unbibium

My dad picked me up and took me to our old house so we could go through those boxes and boxes of old 8-bit computers I have. I never realized how much crap I'd accumulated. I wonder how much I'll make selling it all off.

Well, not all of it. The Commodore 64 wasn't my first computer, or even my third. But it's the earliest surviving computer, and it belonged to my grandfather. It still works, the disk drive still works. It was the computer I stopped getting kicked off BBSes in. And while testing it out, three out of the five disks I looked at had programs I'd written.

A couple were little BASIC loader menus that I programmed so my friends could play games at school. Out of curiosity and nostalgia, I listed out one such menu program I wrote in 1991, to examine my handiwork. It spent about a minute at a screen that said "Processing" while it built some graphics structures out of strings, and it lasted about a minute. A bit too long, I thought. Well, I found a way to make it much faster, so I changed a few lines from this:

19 FOR Z=1 TO LEN(A$(X)):B$(X,Y)=B$(X,Y)+"-":NEXT Z

to this:

19 B$(X,Y)=LEFT$("---------------",LEN(A$(X)))

It took all of two minutes to do it, and the menu then came up immediately. I wrote a little note to my future self at the end of the listing and saved it back to the disk.

I also found an 80-column screen driver which had my handle on it; I think I altered the font so I could read it better. I found a terminal program which had an Atari terminal emulation mode, whose font I also modified. I found a BBS mod I had done, that was sort of in the tradition of "sliding macros". There were also little utility programs I wrote to help me make graphical menus and animations for local BBSes. I also found a lot of such screens I'd done.

I'd at least like to get my listings and screens on paper, for posterity. And I don't think I'll be selling that particular machine.