What was Coding like 40 years ago?

What is this 1080p you speak of? what is lol?

I remember that Beagle Brothers poster! So fun.

Reminds me of programming the Radio Shack TRS80 in BASIC back in the day. Awesome.

Great shirt,great show and great Robert Smith picture from the Cure.

Oh this brings back memories. I did my Ph.D. in engineering on an Apple II+ PC (which I soldered together myself from all the parts you could buy from local electronics stores). I wrote Basic code to solve 3 differential equations that simulate fluid flow and heat transfer in countercurrent packed-bed reactors and heat exchangers, plus additional differential equations to model shrinking-core reaction kinetics. The differential equations were mathematically stiff and very, very difficult to solve numerically and would still not solve after weeks of running. I had to develop a new numerical method for solving stiff differential equations in order to get stable solutions in reasonable time. When I was defending my thesis, several of the professors even suggested that my work could also earn me a Ph.D. in mathematics as well as engineering. I just finished building my latest PC, Gigabyte Aorus X670E Master with AMD Ryzen 9 7950X, overclocked to 5.9 GHz. I am curious to see how this PC handles that old program, recoded from Apple Basic.

There is nothing fascinating or glorious about this. This is the equivalent of someone going back to relieving themselves in a septic tank rather than modern toilets.
you wouldn't go for a septic tank even "for fun"... if you don't like this example you can use other ones like horse carriage as opposed to modern train, washing machine as opposed to the cold river the list goes on.
it just so happens that people who grew up with this are still alive and have nostalgia, which is unprecedented in technology history.

Good times

In the University we had a mainframe. To start it we needed the bootloader. The 0-stage bootloader.
There was NO ROM.
The ROM was a series of binary addresses and machine code instructions written in a plastic ring-bound notes.
The notes was to be found in a safe, the key could be found in the office of the mainframe admin.
There was a console with 24 toggles for digits, and few more toggles for select mode (address/instruction) and store/clear/cancel and Execute.
One person was reading from a plastic-spiral-bound notes the other toggling.
The program was enough to start a perforated-tape reader and swallow a smallish plastic tape roll (yep, the one from the safe).
This was a program smart enough to start a magnetic drum which would load another smarter bootloader which actually could load the teletype driver and the magnetic tape driver.
Now we could load OS (yep, that big tape from the safe).
The mainframe normally was never shut down and the magnetic core RAM could survive a short power shortage, unless the program needed more RAM so it would save some OS-related stuff on the drum and use it and hopefully restore it before termination.
But the state power grid usually served at least one power outage per week.
If the bootlaoder on the drum got corrupted, there was another longer perforated tape in the safe. This procedure worked but now always, forgot the reasons.
If it did not work the remedy was: make a short but solemn prayer then repeat.

Nope. This was a luxury I was not afforded. I had to write programs in Fortran, PL-I or Cobol on a cross-guided sheet of papaer which I had to hand to the specialists which would using a teletype-like keyboard punch a stack of cards or produce a roll of a punch-tape. Then I had to hand the stack or the roll to the operator-on-duty which would put it in the queue: the one on the shelf. Then I would leave and if everything went OK I would be able to collect the deck/roll back with the results, pages of line-printer printout.
At this point I would be lucky if I got just a compiler error, most likely I would get few incorrect characters (hanging chads anybody?) which I might have to be able to fix with small pieces of paper and glue or a manual punch.
Repeat.
Fix the compiler error (this sometimes was by adding a small patch-batch).
Repeat.
Add print statements to assist the bug-hunt.
Repeat.
Maybe get some result.
Prepare more test inputs.
Again, found bugs in corner cases. Add more prints.
Repeat. It is Saturday, so get smashed in the bar on the way back to home.
Sunday, nurse the hangover. Examine the notes made in the bar supposedly fixing the bugs, the head aches too much.
Monday, the hangover gone, the notes still do not make sense.
Repeat.

pretty similar to commador 128. This brought me back thanks.👍

Q: Can you make your snake with python3 in 2023?

I love your movie, developers had a good times in the past ! Programming style was great for starting to program but quickly became hard once the application complexity grows.
This is almost how I started programming in 1990 as a kid, from the computer user manual in PN BASIC and with help from my father. And you had books where you learned coding by creating games.

So it's mean you, can't EDIT line?

Great tutorial! Grown up in the 70ies/80ies,not so Computer-affine,i seriously think about learning programming in my retirement now!

Damn a for 100 loop slowing down the program by a lot is hilarious today

That was exhausting. All that work to make a letter move around. I can't imagine programing call of duty battlefield, or whatever kids today play. I'm gonna go play outside. Thanks.

I keep wondering how I would have gotten my hands on a Unix machine to run source control on, and how I would have transferred files back and forth to my Atari when I was 12.

Around 1978, when I was 18, my father and I wrote Games Pack 1 for the TRS-80 computer. It included Poker, Spades, Hearts, Battleship, Spades, and a snake game. Snake was for one or two players. It was published by Micro Pro International. We were able to use different graphical characters to make different patterns on each snake so you could tell them apart. One of the players used the four arrow keys, and the other used letters on the keyboard, like WASD. We used PEEK also to check the status of the keys. We didn't have food, but the snakes just grew with time. With two players, you would lose if you went off the screen or you collided with the other player. Great fun times!

I programmed in Basic language at Honeywell in 1969 using punched strips of coiled paper. In the mid to late 1970s I programmed in Fortran on IBM computers using (three long boxes of) punched cards and then gradually switched to programming using smart terminals, monitors, and smaller computers that had access to small amounts of digital memory and hard disk drives. For my own personal use I have owned various Apple computers since the late 1970s until today.

You lucky bastard. You probably are born a few years later then me. For my first programming was in Wang Basic which is similar to what you did here but a few years before the this apple. No graphics mode on the Wang but we did create games the same you did here. The nostalgia is great. I spend so many hours behind the Wang which was at my fathers work. The Wang was very very expensive. A person could not afford it. A university could. Peek and pokes were not avaiable at Wang Basic.

Ah, the memories. The kids of today have no idea about the joy of typing BASIC code and making something work for the first time!

First time to this channel. I thought this was hilarious!!!

Had a Tandy TS-80....COding sucked then, and it sucks now. lol

I'm 46 seconds in. GREAT JOB, I love the 80s look. I think you only missed saying "rad" for the full experience

My first quasi-job out of grad school (1987), I worked for a little start-up doing test routines of other people's/other companies' code. The good thing was that, beyond my C skills (it was a Unix shop), I learned Pascal and Fortran, in about 3 weeks. But then, we had a new glucose-test-unit's source to test out. It was written by an MD (who had taught himself to code) and was a monolith of about 387k of Interpreted BASIC [hell]: essentially, every other line was a GOTO or a GOSUB. Luckily, within 3 months, I got my first real job, at Autodesk (in Sausalito at the time), got my own big office, the latest PC, a Sun III workstation (plus a 20Mb Bernoulli drive!), and, more importantly, got to go back to my first love, C. BASIC was the worst.

You had me at 'sub-routine'.❤

Believe it or not, I actually wrote a Snake game 40 years ago on a Apple II+ for a junior high school ( now called middle school ) Computer Science class project when we were given a homework to write a program using the Apple II+ low definition graphics. I decide to write a game inspired by the Atari 2600 game Surround ( essentially, the Snake game ). I was extremely lucky to go to a New York City public school that offered a Computer Science course 40 years ago. When my sons where in middle school in our well-off suburb about 7-10 years ago, there was no CS class offered, and somehow I was learning CS in my local New York city junior high school in the early 80s. I am also very grateful that my middle class Dad probably sacrificed getting a newer used car and going on nicer vacations, so he could by his sons the Apple II+ the Christmas after I started the Computer Science class. My younger brother and me both have careers in software development today, and it might not have happened if my Dad had not bought that Apple II+.

That delay you did uses computal power. Would have been better to make the movement a function of time

I would assume that, just like on the C64 you should be able, after doing a LIST, to edit a line by going up with the cursor keys and making the modifications there, then press Enter. This way it should also be possible to do a primitive renumbering of a few lines by modifying the line numbers and pressing Enter. Or doesn't that work on the Apple II plus?

Nice video... just too long.

Oh my goodness, i needed to see this. This is reminding me of why I got into comp sci in the first place.

So interesting to see how far we have gone from that kind of programming. It is so interesting to see how any programming language can be powerful, no matter how primitive it may look. Thanks sir. You made it so easy to do.

You took me back to 1987 when I was programming with Commodore 64. 😄

Why, why, why did people use BASIC where there were better alternatives!

Write complex Chess AI with this.

Next, code snake using only machine code on a 1893 Eclipse toaster.

I wish to someday be as good at programming

God that The Cure poster is hella gnarly. Makes me wanna veg out and listen to their new album with my homeboy, Tom. He's a bit of a freakazoid and is a little grody but we've been best friends ever since I found him ralphing all over the bathroom wall at this totally tubular party. Needless to say the home owners were butter so we had to motor.

Catchy song. Did you write it?

This is so cool!!

I got a book from the library when that computer was in my school. I got in trouble for coding snake in high res because other students did not do their homework. I edited the color code line for dying so occasionally you could pass through instead of dying. It changed color every move. Loved that game you should do the edit and play it. I called it snake roulette. That was my first code opened my life to every os I could get my hands on!

fun as hell ! I smiled the whole video.

The first coding I ever did was apple soft basic on an apple ][. The first snake game I played was on a TSR 80.

This takes me back! It's like Bob Ross programming sessions.

As a college student born in the early 2000's, I LOVED the ABBA reference on the piano in the intro <3

Love this bloke

When I was about 12 years old on the C64, I would always have to look up the RND syntax as well.... still cant remember it.

Daniel congratz on all the progress that you've made over the years! :)

And how the hell did you record that screen ? :D