Kindred Code

Kindred Code

10 PRINT is not a game. It does not present itself as a game. It has no playable character. And aside from stopping the endless progression of the drawing loop, the person at the screen has no opportunity for interaction. The person may try to solve the maze, find various paths through it, but these attempts are frustrated by the continuous progression of the maze at it scrolls up the screen. By this criteria, 10 PRINT seems an unlikely object of study in the world where interactivity is king.

Since the earliest studies of digital culture, writing about literary hypertext and game studies, much has been made of the potential, possibility, and power of interactivity. Hypertexts [cite some Landow here] afford the reader the opportunity to engage in navigating the text beyond mere page turning. The interactivity [cite some Crawford or Aarseth or Juul] of video games immerses the player in the gameworld. Certainly the early 21st century discourse on web 2.0 [cite Tim O’Reilly] clarions a similar engagement through user actions and contributions, writing blogs, correcting and expanding wikis, tweeting.

However, this last example makes clear the oversights of the previous, namely that interactivity is framed as an activity that occurs between the user and the system at the level of the interface. Nick Montfort (2004) and Matthew Kirschenbaum (2008) have identified this tendency among scholars as a sign of “screen essentialism,” in which, as Kirschenbaum puts it, the “digitla event on the screen” becomes the sole object of study, at the expense of the underlying code, the hardware, the storage devices, and even the non-digital inputs and outputs that make the digital object possible in the first place. As the BASIC and Commodore 64 chapters make clear, 10 PRINT circulates in a cultural moment that privileges interaction at the level of the program, the lines of code. 10 PRINT epitomizes a relationship between human and computer where the software is not the application that is executed but the means by which the human will come to better understand the operations of the computer. Nor is software, in this case, a completed system loaded from stored memory, but fragment, an always-partial set of processes subject to change, expansion, revision, and reimagining. To type in that code is to begin an exercise, to put the bike on the road, the surf board in the water.

A program is a process, is a part of a process, a sign of a process, an excerpt from a process. Programs are in process, and their lines of code mark potential. Software is typically conceived in commercial terms as a discrete, quantifiable object that can be contained and exchanged, owned and licensed, borrowed and pirated. However, endless versioning, patches, fixes, expansions make clear, even on the commercial end, that software is always in the stream of its own realization, or as the development paradigms of github and subversion would have it, a fork of a previous system. Development systems use “versioning” as a central metaphor for development. Software in this context emerges as a Text, in Barthes’ terms, and the program, a Work:

The one [Workl] is displayed, the other [Text] demonstrated; likewise, the work can be seen (in bookshops, in catalogues, in exam syllabuses), the text is a process of demonstration, speaks according to certain rules (or against certain rules); the work can be held in the hand, the text is held in language, only exists in the movement of a discourse (or rather, it is Text for the very reason that it knows itself as text); the Text is not the decomposition of the work, it is the work that is the imaginary tail of the Text; or again, the Text is experienced only in an activity of production.

As mentioned in the introduction, 10 Print begins with a line a number following the convention of BASIC programs. In fact, for this version of BASIC, since the program is written in PROGRAM mode, it must have a line number. However, the line number is not a necessary element of the program even on these early Commodore computers. The program could be written in DIRECT mode as: