Introduction

The more general discussions in this book are organized in five chapters and a conclusion. Before each of the five chapters and before the conclusion are six "Remarks." These are more specific discussion of particular computer programs that relate directly to 10 PRINT: They are programs that we have found or (in the spirit of early Commodore 64 BASIC programmers, who were encouraged to modify, port, and elaborate code and who often did) that we have developed that shed light on how 10 PRINT works. They are called "Remarks" in honor of BASIC's REM statement, which allowed programmers to use a line of a program to write a remark or comment.

The Remarks are on a port and elaboration of 10 PRINT in the language Processing by Casey Reas (co-creator of Processing); a collection of Commodore 64 BASIC one-liners found in early 1980s print sources; an assembly language demoscene production inspired by 10 PRINT and written by Ian Bogost, Stephane Hockenhull, and Nick Montfort; an array of variants and ports of 10 PRINT written by several of us and Warren Sack; and a greatly elaborated version of the program in Commodore 64 BASIC, by Michael Mateas, which generates stable full-screen mazes and tests them for solubility.

The first chapter, "Mazes," considers the many things that it might mean for a computer program to generate a maze pattern in 1982. The chapters plumbs the cultural associations with the maze, which has at various times been a terrifying and lethal threat, an upper-class outdoor amusement, and an instrument for behavioral science. The history of mazes in computing through the early 1980s is considered as well.

"Regularity," the second chapter, considers the aspects of 10 PRINT that repeat in various ways: in space, in time, and in the program's flow of control. The aesthetic and computational nature of repetition is discussed, and some regular specifics of the Commodore 64 are described, so that the interplay between regularity and randomness, which is crucial to the program's interesting effect, can be understood.

The third chapter, "Randomness," looks at how randomness or chance has been considered culturally -- from its use in games of chance, through its employment in the arts, and up to its use in simulation and science in recent decades. The chapter discusses how computers came to generate randomness (or, at least, approximations to it) and the ways in which the Commodore 64 generates randomness, including via the RND function that is used in 10 PRINT.

"BASIC," the fourth chapter, explains the original development of BASIC in the context of programming languages and time-sharing. It continues to describe how BASIC came to home computing -- thanks largely to Microsoft, the company that developed the Commodore 64's version of BASIC. Some of the controversies within the hobbyist community and some of the complexities of Microsoft's early position and involvement are also discussed. The chapter concludes by describing two of the ways that short BASIC programs were often circulated: in print publications and (particularly in the case of interesting one-lines) by being memorized and later typed in.

The fifth chapter, "The Commodore 64," describes the history and some of the important technical aspects of the very popular machine that 10 PRINT canonically runs on. Important aspects of Commodore's corporate history and of the computers that preceded the Commodore 64 are discussed, as is the home computer market and phenomenon in general. The KERNAL (the Commodore 64's operating system, stored in 8K of ROM) and its relationship to 10 PRINT is also discussed.

[In all of these cases, there should be a statement about one or two of the most important arguments being made in each chapter -- not just what is discussed, etc. -Nick]