In February, I stumbled upon the BASIC 10Liner Contest, an extreme challenge of creating an entire video game in 10 lines of BASIC code. BASIC was the de-facto language of the home computing revolution in the late 1970s through the 1980s. The first Apple, Atari, and Commodore (and other) computers shipped with BASIC as the…
Category: retro
Back to BASIC : Part 1
Explore! When you learn something new, it is essential to let your curiosity take the lead. As children, we are born with the spirit of an explorer. Even before we can speak or crawl, our minds are fixed upon exploring every aspect of the world that surrounds us. Looking every which way, vocalizing, grasping, observing,…
Commodore in the Cloud : Part 1
For many years, the cloud was a realm I mostly explored at work during the day. When it came time to climb back down the beanstalk and hang up my plumber overalls and pipe wrench, I was perfectly happy to exist on traditional Linux virtual private servers or physical machines at home like my MacBook…
Simple BBS in a Commodore Emulator
If you roamed the Earth in the time when every household had a personal computer but only a few had ever heard of something called the Internet, then you probably remember using a modem to dial into a Bulletin Board System or BBS. At that time, unless you were among the lucky few with access…
8-Bit Computing in the 21st Century : Part 2
Let the fun begin! Now that I had a working Commodore 64, I was extremely excited to explore the programs and games from a earlier time in personal computing. I didn’t have a floppy disk drive for this Commodore, but I did have the original data cassette (or datasette) tape drive and using that I…
8-Bit Computing in the 21st Century : Part 1
One of my earliest memories of using a personal computer was hanging out at my friend Mike Wolter’s house in 1986 and playing the text adventure game Zork on his Commodore 64. I vividly remember the ritual of taking the floppy disk out of its paper envelope and inserting it carefully into the disk drive….