BASIC

BASIC programs were, from the first years of the language, circulated using ink on paper. In 1964 and the years following, there was no Web or even Internet to allow for the digital exchange of programs, and it was often impractical to distribute programs on computer-readable media such as paper tape. From the mid-1970s through the early 1980s, BASIC was known in print not only through manuals and textbooks that explicitly taught programming in the language, but also through collections of programs and program that appeared in magazines. The printed materials that remain today give insight into the practices BASIC users adopted and the culture that developed among them.

Many computer magazines featured BASIC programs in addition to the one discussed earlier in this chapter, ''Dr. Dobb's.'' For instance, ''Creative Computing'' was a significant early magazine for microcomputer users interested in exploring computing. Founded by David H. Ahl, who also wrote some ground-breaking books, this magazine for the home computer hobbyist was launched in 1974 (before the Altair 8800) and published until 1985.

As ''Creative Computing'' was nearing the end of its run, other magazines, many of them platform-specific, were just getting started. One was ''RUN'' (1984-1992), a monthly magazine that was published by IDG Communications, focused on the Commodore 64 and VIC-20, and included a version of 10 PRINT in its pages. A German edition of ''RUN'' was published as well, and ''ReRUN'' disks made programs in the magazine available for purchase in machine-readable format. Another home computer magazine of this era was ''Compute!'' (1979-1994), which began as ''Pet Gazette,'' a 1978 magazine put together by Len Lindsay that was specific to the Commodore PET computer. In July 1983, ''Compute!'' launched a spin-off publication, ''Compute!'s Gazette,'' for Commodore 64 and VIC-20 owners specifically. In the UK there were several other magazines for Commodore users, including ''Zzap! 64'', ''Commodore User'', and ''Commodore Format''. The last of these did not start publishing until October 1990. This magazine was not about BASIC or learning to program, however. It focused on gaming and offered game news, reviews, and cheats, with its "Powerpack" tape offering full games and demos for subscribers to load and run.

While magazines were ready and regular sources of new programs, many also found enjoyable code in books. David H. Ahl's influential and early compilation, ''101 Basic Computer Games'', was first published in 1973 by the Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). This was the first book to collect only games in BASIC. It includes a sample run of each game and acknowledges the programmers who contributed each game. Each program's "computer limitations" are described so that users understand the specific BASIC dialects and hardware that are supported. Illustrations, courtesy of ''Mad Magazine'' among others, punctuate the presentation -- a rather playful presentation for a corporate publication from a 1970s computer company. The game's titles are abbreviated at at most six letters, so they can be used as filenames, since they did not exceed six letters. The abbreviations were rather cryptic, with ACEYDU standing for "Acey Ddeucy CArd Game"; AMAZIN for "Draw a Maze"; or POET for "Random Poetry (Haiku)." In the preface, the educational value of playing and creating games and the need for "unguided learning" is emphasized.

A new edition of this book, ''Basic Computer Games, Microcomputer Edition,'' appeared in January 1978 -- reflecting BASIC's move from timesharing minicomputers to microcomputers. This edition's preface begins with a dictionary definition (from an unnamed dictionary) of the word "game." It then provides a cursory history of sports and games moving from the ancient Chinese and Egyptians to the 1970s in little more than a paragraph and a half, emphasizing that games offer recreational breaks from the "realities of life" and also have other "important redeeming virtues." The programs in this book are all said to run on the gold standard of microcomputer BASICs: MITS Altair 8K BASIC, Rev. 4.0 (ix). The games, no longer referred to by cryptic six-character tags, are organized by category -- e.g., "Introductory Fun;" "Educational;" "Plotting and Pictures;" "Number and Letter Guessing;" "Remove an Object;" "Matrix Manipulation;" "Logic;" "Space;" "Sports Simulation;" "Gambling Casino;" "Card and Board;" "Combat;" etc. Perhaps these categorizations relate to later, well-recognized computer game genres. But it would be hard to fit 10 PRINT into any category except "Introductory Fun" or (to use the category found in ''RUN'') "One-Liner."

Later in 1978, this compilation was published again by Workman Publishing under the lengthy title ''Basic Computer Games, Microcomputer Edition. 101 Great Games to Play on Your Home Computer. By yourself or with others. Each complete with programming and sample run.'' Its translation into German in 1982 (and reprinting in German in 1983) shows how BASIC games, no doubt thanks to this book's large trade publisher, made their way abroad.

The People's Computer Company offered a collection of BASIC games, too: Bob Albrecht's large-format ''What To Do After You Hit Return,'' which came out originally in 1975. This book was handed off to a series publishers and underwent several printings. Neither the front nor the back cover even bothered to mention that the programs inside were in BASIC, indicating that the language was the lingua franca for recreational programming.

Given the growing popularity of BASIC and computers among hobbyists, it is not surprising to see other, presentations of BASIC such as the 1978 ''The Little Book of BASIC Style. How to write a program you can read'' by John M. Nevison. With its reference to the ''Elements of Style'' by E. B. White, this book insists that programs have human readers and can be written with them in mind. Related titles include the 1979 ''Programming for Poets. A Gentle Introduction Using BASIC'', a simplified textbook, and the 1978 ''BASIC With Style. Programming Proverbs.''

While many early books about BASIC are about pursuing hobbies and playing games, and others were focused on teaching the reader programming, there were also ones such as Charles D. Sternberg's ''BASIC Computer Programs for the Home'' (1980). Its specific aim was to satisfy "the practical requirements of the home." The author encourages the "modification of these programs to utilize features of your particular machine should present few difficulties." In the introduction the author explains that he eschews "highly efficient routines" in favor of increased "clarity" and a "modularity" which lends itself to easier alteration.

There were plenty of features of printed BASIC programs that facilitated exploration, modification, and learning. While programs in machine language were also printed at times, printed BASIC programs such as 10 PRINT were distributed as human-understandable source code. Since people typed them in, they were easily able to type further and modify the programs -- or even to make some changes as they were entering them. And, since programs sometimes had typos in them or didn't work with a particular reader's dialect of BASIC, modifying the program was sometimes necessary. The transmission of BASIC programs in print wasn't a flawless, smooth system, but it did encourage engagement with code, an awareness of how it functioned, and a realization that it could be revised and reworked.

Many have difficulty now remembering 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. Programs were indeed transmitted in this way, though; a hint of this is still seen when people are invited to key in code snippets from books on programming.

There is an even stranger way that programs, particularly short ones such as BASIC one-liners sometimes made their way from computer to computer and from person to person: by being memorized. This is not to say 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 remember a one-liner, or a handful of short programs, 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 of course in BASIC. (See "Remarks: One-Liners" for several examples.) And since programmers typically had to memorize certain BASIC statements, such as <code>? CHR$(147)</code> (which clears the screen), it was not much of a leap to memorize a program that contained two statements in that language, such as <code>10 PRINT CHR$(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, spirals 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. In the culminating moment of "0wnz0red," it is revealed that while Murray apparently can't easily memorize a random sequence of characters, his powers of recall extend beyond human language: "once he had the laptop open and began to rekey the entire codebase, the eidetic rush of perfect memory dispelled all his nervousness, leaving him cool and calm as the sun set over the Mission." Murray is human enough that he cannot recall an arbitrary 4KB, but enough of a savant that he can perfectly remember not only documentation but a mass of code.

For many programmers, however, memorizing one-liners (not the entire codebase) is both possible and useful. Perl is used for a wide variety of text processing tasks; many who program in it find it useful to write, recall, or adapt one-line programs that work on the command line. For instance, to convert a file <code>dosfile.txt</code> with DOS-style line endings to Unix format, a common task for many programmers, the carriage returns (\r) must be removed. This can be accomplished with the command <code>perl -p -i -e 's/\r\n/\n/g' dosfile.txt</code> which includes a very short program (between quotes) to perform the needed substitution. With a few changes, this code can be adapted to replace one word with another, for instance, substituting "Commodore" for every occurrence of "Atari": <code>perl -p -i -e 's/Atari/Commodore/g' manuscript.txt</code>.

Programmers who use such Perl one-liners do not seem to remember them the way one memorizes lines from a play or a song. They would generally understand how the substitution operator (<code>s///</code>) functions and how command-line flags to Perl work. In other words it is knowing Perl, not just the memorization of a string of symbols, that is important to most uses of Perl one-liners. But the phrase "Perl pie" does helps some to quickly recall which command-line flags are needed in this case, and one-liners are at times as much recalled as figured out and programmed. Many common one-liners are not programmed "from scratch" each time they are used.

This type of non-rote memorization is the sort that BASIC programmers also employed in bringing 10 PRINT from one computer to another to show off its output. Remembering code, like having it printed with the occasional typo, was a "lossy" way to transmit programs. This didn't have purely negative effects, though. Instead of the prefect but opaque way of transferring files via disk or download, the recall and reading of programs left a space for the programmer to work and play. If the recalled version of the program didn't work correctly, the programmer could think about how to change it. If it did work well, the programmer might think to change it further to see what could be done. The wiring of these printed and memorized programs was sometimes messed up, but they were also not in a closed black box.

== Studies of Program Memorization (Sidebar) ==

The idea that a page of code is easier to memorize than a random page of characters is supported by experimental studies. In an effort to better understand how people comprehend computer programs -- which has ramifications for programmer efficiency -- studies of program memorization were undertaken beginning in the mid-1970s. In 1976 Ben Shneiderman, referring to the cognitive science literature on remembering sentences, reported a statistically significant difference between subjects of different ability levels attempting to memorize a FORTRAN program and a series of valid statements in scrambled order, "leading us to the conclusion that the structure of a program facilitates comprehension and memorization" (127).

== A Personal Memory of 10 PRINT (Sidebar) ==