Recent searches
Search options
Do you remember sitting in front of the black and green?
The modem screaming into the void of the unrisen future?
The first time you found this new world?
When was the last time you felt that kind of wonder?
@thegibson My folks got us a Commodore Vic20. I loved that thing. The off white housing. The rounded tape deck. I would spend hours coding BASIC from the back of magazines. I remember the excitement at seeing Commodore programming books in the scholastic book club. I begged my folks to buy me one to code my own text adventure game. I spent most of the summer school holiday typing it out, and making sure to not turn it off and lose my work. I was close to finishing it when my mom unknowingly unplugged it to plug in the vacuum cleaner. All my work was gone. I cried that day
@sh3llcmdr my god that pain is relatable… except it was Sinclair and TI for me. :)
@thegibson @sh3llcmdr Mine was a TRS-80 Color Computer cassette full of my BASIC programs crafted by hand over many months, which my sister stole and taped music over.
@Rob_T_Firefly @thegibson @sh3llcmdr
I learned to save early, save often, on to cheap 10 or 15 minute cassettes which were too short for anyone to tape music over.
@dec23k @Rob_T_Firefly @thegibson I never found a way to back up an incomplete program to tape. You could write to tape once the programming was completed
@sh3llcmdr @Rob_T_Firefly @thegibson
With 1K of RAM, I usually never *needed* to back up incomplete work to tape!
Whether I was typing in listings from magazines or books, or coding my own ideas, there was always some testing and debugging needed. My "save early, save often" was usually one save every couple of hours, after finding and fixing a typo. Saving the new version on top of the previous one on the same cassette. No version numbering, no revision control. That came later (much later).