BASIC
From Maze
(Difference between revisions)
(→Works Cited) | (→BASIC Code in Human Memory) | ||
| Line 212: | Line 212: | ||
It is hard enough these days to remember programs being transmitted on physical media such as floppy disks and cassette tapes. The notion that programs would routinely be published in print and typed by users is even more alien, but programs were indeed transmitted in this way, and people are still invited to key in code snippets of different sorts from books on programming. | It is hard enough these days to remember programs being transmitted on physical media such as floppy disks and cassette tapes. The notion that programs would routinely be published in print and typed by users is even more alien, but programs were indeed transmitted in this way, and people are still invited to key in code snippets of different sorts from books on programming. | ||
| − | There is an even stranger way that programs, particularly short ones such as BASIC one-liners, got from computer to computer and from person to person: by being memorized. The claim here is not that the early 1980s presented a ''Fahrenheit 451'' situation in which the world's great computer programs were preserved by a dedicated few, but that it was common for people who knew a bit of programming to keep a one-liner, or even a handful of short programs, in mind so that they could be typed into a friend's computer. Very short programs that did visually interesting things were particularly worth memorizing. And since programmers typically had to memorize certain BASIC statements, such as <code>? CHR$(147)</code> (which clears the screen), it was not much of a leap to memorize two statements in that language, such as <code>10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10</code>. | + | There is an even stranger way that programs, particularly short ones such as BASIC one-liners, got from computer to computer and from person to person: by being memorized. The claim here is not that the early 1980s presented a ''Fahrenheit 451'' situation in which the world's great computer programs were preserved by a dedicated few, but that it was common for people who knew a bit of programming to keep a one-liner, or even a handful of short programs, in mind so that they could be typed into a friend's computer. Very short programs that did visually interesting things were particularly worth memorizing; in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the mass of these were in BASIC. (See "Remarks: One-Liners" for many examples.) And since programmers typically had to memorize certain BASIC statements, such as <code>? CHR$(147)</code> (which clears the screen), it was not much of a leap to memorize two statements in that language, such as <code>10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10</code>. |
The dream of having total recall of a massive computer program manifests itself in science fiction. In Cory Doctorow's story "0wnz0red," the main character, Murray, who initially appears as a fat slob who, after the death of his only friend Liam, has spiraled downwards personally and in terms of code quality. After Liam returns, having actually hacked his body and mind into near-perfection, Murray is provided with similarly superhuman abilities, including the ability to exactly remember large amounts of English text: "... generating a 4,096 bit key that he could remember was going to be damned hard, but then he closed his eyes and recalled, with perfect clarity, the first five pages of documentation he'd written for the API. His fingers rattled on the keys at speed, zero typos." The keyboard isn't essential to this process: Later, while hooded and being interrogated, Murray recites the entire key. | The dream of having total recall of a massive computer program manifests itself in science fiction. In Cory Doctorow's story "0wnz0red," the main character, Murray, who initially appears as a fat slob who, after the death of his only friend Liam, has spiraled downwards personally and in terms of code quality. After Liam returns, having actually hacked his body and mind into near-perfection, Murray is provided with similarly superhuman abilities, including the ability to exactly remember large amounts of English text: "... generating a 4,096 bit key that he could remember was going to be damned hard, but then he closed his eyes and recalled, with perfect clarity, the first five pages of documentation he'd written for the API. His fingers rattled on the keys at speed, zero typos." The keyboard isn't essential to this process: Later, while hooded and being interrogated, Murray recites the entire key. | ||
