Kindred Code

=== TO INTEGRATE INTO THE CHAPTER ===

[[Algorithms and Action]] (Mark S.)

[[Screensavers and Computer Dreams]] (Nick)

[[Dancing Programs]] (Patsy w/ Nick)

[[Generative Design]] (Casey)

=== ===

10 PRINT is not a game and has not been presented, decades ago or in the book, as one. It has no playable character, "man" or ship. The person at the screen has no opportunity to interact with this BASIC program - the only option is to interact with the BASIC interpreter and interrupt the program. Though a user may try to solve the maze, to find various paths through it, 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 pursuit of digital culture where games are central objects of study and 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 have afforded the reader the opportunity to not just flip pages, but to engage in navigating the text by following links or activating interface elements. The interactivity of video games can give players a sense of agency, immersing them in gameworlds through characters they control. Virtual worlds of various sorts, from MUDs through recent augmented reality games immerse, envelope, and ensnare the player thanks to their interactivity. The early 21st century discourse on web 2.0 began by (O’Reilly 2005) recognizing another expansion of interactivity through "rich user experiences" provided by API-enabled mash-ups as well as through user actions and contributions, writing blogs, correcting and expanding wikis, tweeting.

This last example begins to show an oversights of a basic assumption, namely that, because interactivity is framed as an activity that occurs between the user and the system at the level of the interface, the focus of studies often turns to that 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 “digital 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 circulated in a cultural moment that instead privileged an undrestanding of how programs, lines of code running on computers, actually functioned. 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 a program a completed system loaded from stored memory, but a (functional) fragment, an always-partial set of processes subject to change, expansion, revision, and reimagining. To type in that code is to commence an adventure, to put the bike on the road or the surf board in the water. It was a "HELLO, WORLD" in which the "user," also a programmer, to began to move in and with the language of the system.


=== The Code as Text ===

A program is a process, 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.

[Get some Lexicon here]  It is part of a larger engagement. It is a stub for programs to come. 10 PRINT is a means by which the programmer enters the larger engagement with the processes of the computer, initiates them into the language of the computer and opens their sense of the potential through the program.

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 between 0 and 63,999. 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:
for a=1 to 2 step 0:print chr$(205.5+rnd(1));:next a

As this program remains perpetually at 1, the program continues to print the randomly chosen characters from the original program. Arguably, having learners type this code into the command line would serve the demonstration even better than 10 PRINT, since it allows the beginner to focus on the single line and its output.

The 10 [note 1] of 10 PRINT is a potent signfier of potential, of code to come, of the partiality of the program and indeed all programs, of the need for editing and correcting. The c64 user's guide recommends using increments of 10 to more easily insert lines afterward (33) following a conventional numbering principle in BASIC.  Choosing 10, therefore, rather than 1 suggests that lines may be added to the beginning of the program or after it.  So while 10 PRINT can function as a stand-alone program, it serves as an early step in a learnign process, one that can be easily adapted.  The C64 Users Guide even begins its last paragraph of its version of 10 PRINT, "If you'd like to experiment with this program" (53), and procedes to explain how to adjust the code to increase the likelihood of one or another character appearing more frequently.  The User's Guide did state it's goals, to give you a simple, fun start at learning to make your own programs" (vii).


10 PRINT, thus, represents a class of simple Basic programs designed to be entered by beginners to be later modified.  

Hello, World

The iconic program for being initiated into a programming language is "Hello, World," in which the programmer learns to use the language to get the computer to display those words.  Although not all programming languages use "Hello, World," basic, with its PRINT statement is prime for it.  The Commodore 64 User's Manual replaces this greeting with the name of the computer and a looping statement, turning the computer screen into an advertisement for the computer repeated endlessly.

10 ?"COMMODORE 64"
20 GOTO 10

Though this program does not dazzle or surprise the way 10 PRINT can, it does offer the basic framework for a beginning programer to display any message.  It also contains a number of the basic components of 10 PRINT, namely, the line number, the PRINT statement and the GOTO loop.  That section of the Users Guide is followed by "editing tips," instructing the programmer how to easily modify the contents.  

Learning a program by typing it in may seem more closely to resemble learning to appreciate a language by memorizing lines of poetry.  However, the use of imitation to learn a creative skill has a long tradition in the arts, be they primarily written, visual, kinetic, or dramatic.  Painters learn to imitate the masters before they create their own works.   Dancers learn to dance established steps before they can choreograph. However, rather than drawing an analogy from high art practice, this mode of learning is closer to the practical arts of cooking and the handcraft of needlework.


=== Hammurabi ===

In the days of iPads, Apps, and, frankly, locked-down graphical user interfaces it is hard to imagine a world where people running a personal computer for the very first time type in programs to learn how the machine works.  Perhaps there are always multiple worlds, as users of Unix-based systems continue to seek out the experience of the command line, that icon of user engagement of contact with the system, akin to the sense of the fixed-gear bike, closer contact with the machine.  And yet even that example of the immediacy offered by an operating system does not capture BASIC culture.

Instead of reading blogs about the latest cloud-based software, excited programmers subscribed to magazines that like the recipes in Red Book, served up a regular set of programs to test out by typing them in.  This process was especially important on machines without storage capacity.

It is within that BASIC culture that many of 10 PRINT's kindred programs emerge.  

Hammurabi offers one example.  In this Pharoah's-eye Point of View simulation game, players rule the kindom as its leader, Hammurabi.  The game itself is, as one recent article puts it, "'Oregon Trail' for potentates."  

In Dreaming in Code, Scott Rosenburg recounts:

I was fifteen years old and in love with a game called Sumer, which put me in charge of an ancient city-state in the Fertile Crescent. Today's computer gamers might snicker at its crudity: its progress consisted of all-capital type pecked out line by line on a paper scroll. You'd make decisions, allocating bushels of grain for feeding and planting, and then the program would tell you how your city was doing year by year. "Hamurabi," it would announce, like an obsequious prime minister who feared beheading, "I beg to report..."

A note on the Ahl version of this code explains that somewhere along the way an M dropped out of the name of the ruler "until a generation of students who have used this program now think that Hammurabi is the incorrect spelling of the name" (Ahl 78).The version in Basic Computer Games also adds to its introduction, "If you wish to change of the factors, the extensive remarks in the program should make modification fairly straightforward" (78).  Again, it is hard to imagine in the age of gaming systems without keyboards game makers encouraging changes to the program itself.   While games that build on user-generated content and levels, such as Little Big Planet and Minecraft, encourage user production, their end-user agreement's still discourage tampering with the program itself.

10-Print is a program that encourages users to trace out its paths and then to improvise.