The BASIC print+goto loop might have been my first ever program too (in the 80s) but one thing for sure for me: it was definitely not “Hello, World”. I and others filled the screen with any number of silly things, random words, jokes and juvenile phrases, whatever, but for some reason, “Hello, World!” was a C thing, and I remember seeing it for the first time in a C class in high school, and then much more often in college.
I have memories of ‘poke’ as well. On the Atari 800 you could poke memory to change the keystroke repeat rate and delay before repeat started, so obviously we would turn down the delay to zero and turn up the repeat to max (it was maybe 60 characters per second), so anyone trying to type couldn’t hit the keys quickly enough to avoid repeating. You’d have to power-cycle the machine to fix it, so it was hilarious to 11 year old me.
Similar to his description of ‘poke’, but different mechanism - using debug.com on an IBM PC jr to edit the Ultimate III save files, and give myself maximum money and lives.
On my Spectrum I came up with:
10 GOTO 20
20 GOTO 10
It would start the Spectrum's "loading screen" border which would then scroll infinitely.
At some point I also opened it up to see what it looked like on the inside, but I managed to damage the keyboard in the process. Thereafter whenever I wanted to play a game (via joystick) I would have to use a piece of wire to manually select the rows/columns of the matching keys to enter the load command.
dahart · · focus · HN ↗
I have memories of ‘poke’ as well. On the Atari 800 you could poke memory to change the keystroke repeat rate and delay before repeat started, so obviously we would turn down the delay to zero and turn up the repeat to max (it was maybe 60 characters per second), so anyone trying to type couldn’t hit the keys quickly enough to avoid repeating. You’d have to power-cycle the machine to fix it, so it was hilarious to 11 year old me.
Similar to his description of ‘poke’, but different mechanism - using debug.com on an IBM PC jr to edit the Ultimate III save files, and give myself maximum money and lives.
Good times!
animal531 · · focus · HN ↗
It would start the Spectrum's "loading screen" border which would then scroll infinitely.
At some point I also opened it up to see what it looked like on the inside, but I managed to damage the keyboard in the process. Thereafter whenever I wanted to play a game (via joystick) I would have to use a piece of wire to manually select the rows/columns of the matching keys to enter the load command.