many of those magazines are bedaubed with felt-tip where I marked my progress whiling away hours typing in those programs.
I got into computers in the mid 70s with the advent of the Altair. Reading your comment was like a flashback. I remember you’d finally get through, meticulously typing in all the pages of code. So your cross your fingers and ran it and got an error. But I was hooked. I still have my Altair, Timex/Sinclair, Ti 99 & 994a. I had/have everything imaginable for the Ti. You needed a kitchen table to spread all that out on.
Later on, as you say, demos became a big thing, I loved the demos. I would write just about anyone giving away a demo of something. Game demos would at least let you play one or two levels.
So your cross your fingers and ran it and got an error.
And eventually we learned to understand the programs we were typing in, knowing what those errors meant and how to fix them without looking back at the listing. Magical.
I got into computers in the mid 70s with the advent of the Altair. Reading your comment was like a flashback. I remember you’d finally get through, meticulously typing in all the pages of code. So your cross your fingers and ran it and got an error. But I was hooked. I still have my Altair, Timex/Sinclair, Ti 99 & 994a. I had/have everything imaginable for the Ti. You needed a kitchen table to spread all that out on.
Later on, as you say, demos became a big thing, I loved the demos. I would write just about anyone giving away a demo of something. Game demos would at least let you play one or two levels.
And eventually we learned to understand the programs we were typing in, knowing what those errors meant and how to fix them without looking back at the listing. Magical.