Early Home Computer Nostalgia

I had one when I was like 11 or so. Loved its fake Pacman game. I learned some Basic. Such a distinct memory of spending a whole day copying a program from Byte magazine (or something like it), getting the game to run well after my bedtime, playing it one or two times, then… just turning off the computer, losing all that work. I was never able to convince my mom to buy the fancy tape recorder that would have let me save programs. It was a while till I programmed again, but the seed was definitel

Ah, the fond memories of learning programming on my Commodore 65.536 while growing up...

My take on what it was like during the era of Home Computers.

My dad had one of these, it was stored in the attic because it was already hopelessly outdated, until little me found it. I found the various graphical characters pretty interesting (that was before I could read, let alone read English BASIC commands) and started to "draw" stuff with it on the screen. Eventually I figured out very simple programs, like printing the same repeatable pattern over and over on the screen like a chain, and how to store those on a cassette and load them again

I started out thinking I could afford the ZX-81 kit. My parents wouldn't let me buy it even with my own savings. Instead they made me wait and got me an Atari 400, which I'm glad they did. Some of my other friends also had Atari, C64, Apple II, and TI 99/4A (my electrical teacher had one too). Our school had TRS-80s which seemed the most powerful CPU-wise but with not much for graphics/sound. I knew the least about the TI since there didn't seem to be much info available

Thanks for sharing! Mine was a pretty similar experience in the eighties, because you could learn so much just by reading books and doing experiments. Recently, I got three Commodore 64 (the descendants of the PET) and I just want to type some BASIC games and start learning. I'm very humbled by the experience of writing "Programming Boot Sector Games", because like you, many people have told me about having a nice experience reading and learning with it, and I'm glad the effo

I apologize for the slightly tangential response but your post merits more than a POU (Plain Old Upvote).30 years ago a C64 was My First Computer, a birthday present. Llamasoft's Attack of the Mutant Camels was my first game, swiftly followed by the insanely fast Gridrunner.I cut my teeth on Commodore v2 BASIC and 6502 assembler. I turned down an early teens New Year's party (girls and everything...) to hack on an assembler monitor from Y64 magazine.And I don't regret it.Recognizing

Excellent work and a fun read. I've got fond memories of loading programs from cassette tape on a Vic-20 in the early 80s (it took 10 minutes or so kids). I tried typing in a game from a magazine and was unsuccessful too--it never worked right, pre crc. Me and a few cousins had a ball though with a random sentence generator program. We filled all the data statements with all the bad words a group of 12 year olds could think up. Good times.It was my first exposure to programming, and

Good memories sitting with dad at the VIC-20 when I was about four years old, typing in BASIC programs from magazines. Once, we typed in a drawing program and drew the planets with the joystick. We also went to local computer shows and brought back programs on data cassettes to try out. Fun times, and I was hooked!

I remember typing in some of these on my Commodore 64. Those were fun days!