Computer and coding books from Usborne (1982-1985)
13 points by pushcx
13 points by pushcx
Wow. Nice!
I had access to a couple of the games books as a young child, and remember working through them on my family’s Apple //c.
A thing I’ve enjoyed in a similar vein is this repo:
https://github.com/coding-horror/basic-computer-games
where people have reimplemented the games from 101 BASIC Computer Games in various languages.
I’m adding this Usborne collection to my “Game Jam Ideas” notebook. I think reimagining one of these could be fun for a couple-day-long game jam.
These are incredible, I’ve never seen anything like them, some of the illustrations in the “computer games listings” sections are breathtaking, are they original?? Does anyone have experience with the modern equivalents and if they’re also good?
These are hosted on Google Drive. They have gone away before. There may be copies on Internet Archive, but they may be marked “borrow only”.
As for worthy successors, dunno. For all of BASIC’s dialect quirks, it was right there when you turned a home computer on. Now there are far too many languages to choose from, and none boot directly from power-on.
Maybe:
Python comes with its own games built in, if you’re trying to work from previously-published listings. These games include:
Python comes with its own games built in, if you’re trying to work from previously-published listings. These games include:
“Is it 2, or is it 3?”: a delightful game of guessing whether the code was ever meant to work;
Did you read the books in the post? They well pre-date python, and come with the same exact kind of game. For those of us who read such books or magazines, it was a regular sport to determine which BASIC dialects required adaptation and just how we should do so.
Picking a random book from the Usborne page, computer-spy-games.pdf, for instance, such adjustments are so common that they’re listed in the front matter of the book with a symbol next to each variant. And then after each program, they use those symbols to tell you what changes you probably neet to make to the program for your system.
And for the ones that were meant to be compatible with Apple ][-series machines, you had to know whether to start your interpreter in “INT” mode or “FP” mode.
TBH, I don’t think it’s gotten worse, not even a little… even as I do wish my kids’ computers would start into a REPL by default.
The public library near my house had these when I was a kid and they’re 100% responsible for me learning how to program. “The Mystery of Silver Mountain” was the first time I started to realize that, after typing in the source code of the game, I could decode the big DATA sections whenever I got stuck at a specific part of the game and figure out what I needed to do next. Then I started playing around with adjusting how the game worked. And then after doing this a few times I started designing my own on pen & paper and making my own.
This would have been on exceptionally old hardware at the time. It would have been around 1990 and I was doing it all on a Vic-20 (4kB of RAM! released in 1981) because that’s all my family could afford. Not too long afterwards we upgraded to an XT clone where I was finally liberated from BASIC and ended up getting an early DOS-based C compiler. Wild times!
Sadly, their web site ignores the browser language setting and uses geo-ip instead… Sigh. Can’t companies not break and mangle an incoming link?