Oh man, I learned so much from these books and a few other similar ones.
I learned to program a few years after these were popular (around 1991 or so), but a friend of my dad’s gifted me a bunch of them after he found out I was into computers. I was 8, and it changed my life.
They were magical to me. I didn’t even have access to a BASIC interpreter yet (I didn’t even know what that meant), but I read the intro to BASIC programming book and the computer games books so many times. I remember running to my parents room to tell them I could use PRINT to output to the screen. I would write programs by hand onto paper.
I remember a few months later going to my dad’s friend and asking, “ok, where do I type these programs in?” He gave me a copy of QBasic, and away I went.
I remember having to learn so much to get the games to work. I learned about different versions of BASIC, and how to convert things to work in my version. Taking bits of one game and combining them with others. Making my own.
Comments
Oh man, I learned so much from these books and a few other similar ones.
I learned to program a few years after these were popular (around 1991 or so), but a friend of my dad’s gifted me a bunch of them after he found out I was into computers. I was 8, and it changed my life.
They were magical to me. I didn’t even have access to a BASIC interpreter yet (I didn’t even know what that meant), but I read the intro to BASIC programming book and the computer games books so many times. I remember running to my parents room to tell them I could use PRINT to output to the screen. I would write programs by hand onto paper.
I remember a few months later going to my dad’s friend and asking, “ok, where do I type these programs in?” He gave me a copy of QBasic, and away I went.
I remember having to learn so much to get the games to work. I learned about different versions of BASIC, and how to convert things to work in my version. Taking bits of one game and combining them with others. Making my own.
My life has never been the same since.