Operating An 8-Bit Machine Was A Voyage Of Discovery, Characterised By Repeated Stabs In The Dark And Valuable Little Hand-Holding.

Operating an 8-bit machine was a voyage of discovery, characterised by repeated stabs in the dark and dear tiny hand-holding. The Commodore 64, arguably the best-selling computer model ever and 30 years old this month, presented you with a blue screen featuring the message “38911 BASIC BYTES FREE. READY.”

Prepared for what? Prepared for code. Clacking away at the keyboard in a language the machine accepted (in this example BASIC) was the only methods by which you might interact with it. It seems almost ludicrous today as we point, click, swipe and pinch our way through rich graphical user interfaces, but the user-unfriendliness of the Commodore 64 and its cousins taught a generation of enthusiasts the easy way to program. “It was the beginning of a new age,” asserts Jeff Minter, mythical games programmer whose reputation was cemented by his work for the Commodore 64. “It opened up worlds of creativeness to folk who otherwise might never have found them.”

The Commodore 64 debuted at the Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January 1982 to gasps of skepticism from competing technology firms. Its graphic and sonic capacities looked way beyond its $595 ticket, and when it became available in the States in Aug that year it quickly beat the opposition. An aggressive marketing program saw it appear on the shelves of toy and malls, contributing to a steep decline in the popularity of games consoles but while gaming was its main selling point, you could do much more.

“There was a massive fervour for coding back then, for pushing the limits of the machine,” claims one previous Commodore 64 owner, Steve Harcourt. “It was relatively straightforward to code for, and there were a vast quantity of details available about its internal structure.” It may very well have been cutting edge, but you might become acquainted with its every intricacy if you were pleased to put the hours in. And many folks were. “The space between the folks that made the games and the people playing them wasn’t that big,” says Minter. “It was the meaning of independence. The programmers were a lot like you.”

Minter’s games for the Commodore 64,eg Attack Of The Mutant Camels and Sheep In Space, were ground-breaking and extremely popular (the former is shortly to be exhibited at the Smithsonian Museum), but he was also just one member of a burgeoning Commodore 64 community. Compunet, an early UK interactive service accessed through a Commodore 64 and a painfully slow modem, brought that community closer together. “It offered bulletin boards and software downloads,” asserts Harcourt. “This inspired us to code, and it galvanized a deeper keenness for the machine beyond casual gaming.”

“Compunet was fantastic,” agrees Minter. “You could upload these tiny demos of what you’d been working on, and it was a very nice social scene years before the internet.”

That passion to outdo each other, coupled with the restrictions of the machine itself, inspired truly creative programming. It’s outstanding that during the current wave of nostalgia generated by the 30th anniversaries of the Commodore 64, the BBC Micro and other machines, the people who learned how to program in the early 1980s are all grateful for being in the right spot at the right time.

“I taught myself BBC Basic, and when I was 15 I was writing programs like disc sector editors,” explains It advisor Simon Guerrero. “Even if you were just playing games you had to get at least a basic experience of OS operations but now all you’ve got to do is select menu options.”

The present statement by Secretary of the state for Education, Michael Gove, the ICT syllabus is to change from executive skills (spreadsheets, mail combines and the like) to “proper” computer science is one that recognizes a growing unawareness of computer languages. It is a move welcomed by computer scientist Dr Sue Black, who recently founded the Goto Foundation in an effort to spark curiosity in what’s happening under the bonnet of modern computers. “What we need is lots of ways of making programming accessible to folk so it doesn’t scare them off,” she asserts. “I went into computing because I thought it was so exciting, but over the years as an academic I have discovered that folk outside of the industry equate computing with negative stuff you know, like state overspends on IT projects and the like. But so much of the world around us relies on computers. And our natural curiosity in puzzles and problem-solving can simply be channelled into coding.”

But it should be a uphill battle to re-light an interest in coding that was possibly at the peak thirty years ago, when machines like the Commodore 64 just sat there waiting for instructions. “The link between code and creativeness is one I believe we should truly emphasise, and one that we seem to have lost a bit,” asserts Hannah Dee, lecturer in computer science at Aberystwyth University. “When you teach someone a programming language nowadays they want to build large stuff, and there are methods to make that easier by utilizing programming tools like Visual Studio. But you can finish up teaching scholars how to make use of the tools, instead of the simple way to program. Programming really is building stuff out of concepts like magic.”

Jeff Minter has a similar view. “I always considered programming as being like modern-day wizardry,” he asserts. “You could think of things in your brain and then make them happen.”

But in an age where our computers do not need any knowledge of underlying design or components, and computer science is still thought to be an extraordinarily uncool subject contrasted to humanities and media, how will a new generation of computer wizards discover their true calling? “If you would like to play with programming,” claims Dee, “there are ways and means of doing it on any old computer you can start web programming (in Serbian : web programiranje) with Net Explorer and Notepad.” Indeed, the website codeacademy.com has shown that there is a hunger for this type of knowledge, with 300,000 people currently learning how to program in JavaScript via its Code Year initiative.

But it may be the graceful, keyboardless smartphone that finishes up coaxing out our inner geek. Craig Lockwood, previous Commodore 64 owner and founding figure behind appworkshops.com, has been teaching app development for just over twelve months and has seen interest building steadily. “Everyone has a concept for an app,” he says, “and most people have a device for running them. I have been teaching children as young as 9 about coding, beginning with a programmable toy Large Trak that shows them that they can control devices using set processes. That is the elements of coding.”

Jeff Minter sees a parallel between app coding and his very own early efforts. “Once you get over the challenge of how it is possible to get something on the screen it isn’t that hard to make apps and share them with your friends. It may finish up being today’s equivalent of the Commodore 64 community we had back in the early 1980s”, writes tagza.com.

Tags : computers, Design, software, web development