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Uborne Children's Books Release For Free Computer Books From the '80s (usborne.com)
martiniturbide writes: To promote some new computer coding books for kids, Uborne Children's Books has put online 15 of its children books from the '80s to learn how to code games. The books are available for free in PDF format and has samples to create your game for Commodore 64, VIC 20, Apple, TRS 80, Spectrum and other. Maybe you read some of them like "Machine Code for Beginners" or "Write your own Adventure Program for MicroComputers." Should other publishers also start to make their '80s and '90s computer books available for free?
I know editors don't actually do any editing, but come on...
Actio personalis moritur cum persona. (Dead men don't sue)
I'd love free copies of The Art of Programming by Knuth, or any of the K, R, or P books. Maybe even Bjorne.
In order to use some of the more interesting features of BASIC on the C64 you had to POKE to and PEEK from very specific memory locations.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Notably, there were no graphics and sound primitives whatsoever in C64 BASIC. If you wanted to take advantage of the (actually quite impressive, for the day) graphics and sound, you had to directly manipulate memory.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Go to the Atari Archives or Don Lancaster's web page and you'll find many of the classic computer books from the 80's. There are other sites which feature old computer books, all with permission of the rights holder.
I remember typing in the "Haunted House" by hand from Write your own adventure programs for your microcomputer"
The games I wrote never looked like anything the pretty illustrations -- I imagine they helped sell the book. :-)
I remember a book of basic games for my Apple 2+. After entering page after page of code only to have it not work, we found, the back of the book, a small note about how the authors intentionally left errors in the code that you had to troubleshoot. After what seemed like forever of fixing the code, the games sucked. Nowhere near as good as my Atari 2600 games. Good stuff.
Windows 95 came with QBasic built in. QBaisic was a more advanced version of GW-Basic/BasicA that was part of the original IBM PC. It was basically an interpreter only version of Microsoft's QuickBasic. It believe it was was introduced with the release of DOS 5.0. It featured the 1985 ANSI extensions (no line numbers necessary, long variable names, and labels), but it was fully backwards compatible with GW-Basic. It was a DOS program, so it was never promoted or advertised as a feature of Windows 95, but it was still there. I believe that they continued to include it through Windows 98. QBasic would have had little trouble running the old line numbered programs that are in these books. So, you did have a chance to use those books. You just didn't know it! :-)
I actually read that initially as "Unborn Children's Books", and thought this was about audio books meant to play through those womb speakers.
#DeleteChrome
I had that old 'Creepy Computer Games' book. I still might somewhere - I think I saw it in a box a couple of years ago.
That's really what got me excited about computers, and I remember being amazed that I could make the magic box do what I wanted it to.
I had so much fun playing Zork on my Sanyo MBC-555, that being able to actually make the computer do what I wanted, and to write my 'own' games on it, was just astounding.
I might have to go through it again. I doubt re-writing the behavior now would be more than a short exercise, but it might be interesting to see how it goes trying to translate them.
jeesus reading the comments to this question makes me feel old, and also sad that there is such bad information given to the op
yes if you stay away from peeks, pokes, graphics, sound, joystic / paddle io, and the charater set of the C64 they are mostly portable, until they are not cause the methods have different names on different computers depending on if they were keeping compatibility with some pre MS BASIC (such as apple, tandy commie and just about everyone else)
Well, typing those games into the computer was a stepping stone to writing my own games. I made a game which was a Samurai adventure game with random monster encounters, which was really neat because as a kid I discovered the need for programming constructs and structures before I knew they existed. Which is a really nice way to learn.
:)
After BASIC I kept going with programming through my teen years with Pascal, at uni I thought I wanted to study chemistry but had an elective in computer science, and soon after transferred to that degree. I've since been working in IT for the last15 or so years and have released games on mobile phone and PC. I haven't made anything amazing yet but I'm still trying
So, although I have a long way to go I guess I am on the path.
We don't believe in radical loony monotheistic religions from the middle east -- we're Christians.
No, they don't. That's just because you're a horrible human being.
Know how you can tell? It wasn't just boys who learnt by themselves, back in day.
And in these books (yes, I still have them!) you often found a page or two at the back with a set of corrections to make the program work with the BASIC dialects of different machines (Spectrum, TIMEX, ZX80/81, Commodore 64, Commodore Pet, BBC, TRS-80, Apricot, Dragon, Oric, etc.). The sheer diversity is something I miss now it's all generic Intel.
it's funny, but when you think about it, all those BASICs were written by.... Microsoft.
Microsoft BASIC was built-in for most computers of the 80s, the exception being Apple which was a separate product and distinct from integer BASIC by Woz.
GW-BASIC was provided by Microsoft for PC clones which did not have ROM BASIC that the original IBM PCs had - it was a standalone interpreter.
And QBasic/'QuickBasic was its successor, again, a Microsoft product.
And which became Visual BASIC and now is the bane of developers everywhere.
Other than graphics, I think most of these BASICs were compatible mostly because one company was behind them all - Microsoft.