Playing with Programming?

Welcome to this new blog. The goal of Playing with Programming is to explore computers and computing with an eye to the past. The time period from 1977 to 1985 is often referred to as "The Golden Age of 8-bit Computers". Many manufacturers had success with a variety of computer designs. The following is a limited list. The links will take you to OLD-COMPUTERS.COM an on-line museum of computing history. Some of these systems I've played with, at least one I own. The first computer system I purchased was the brown plastic classic, the Commodore 64. Its still in a closet because someday I'll make it an exhibit in a small computer museum.

• Apple - Apple II, Apple IIc 
• Tandy-Radio Shack - TRS-80 Model 1, Color Computer(CoCo)
• Commodore - Pet 2001, C-64 
• Atari - 400, 800 XL 
• Texas Instruments - TI 99/4A

While I put the arbitrary date of 1985 on the end of the 8-bit era, Commodore was making and selling versions of the C-64 until 1993! The 1985 date reflects the year that both Commodore (Amiga 1000) and Atari (520 ST) introduced systems based on the 16/32-bit Motorola 68000 processor. The same chip that Apple used in the original Macintosh launched a year earlier.

But as any computer user knows, hardware is only half of the system. Software is the other half. All of these systems contained some variety of the BASIC programming language. Each one tweaked just a bit to allow access to the those features that made the computers distinctive. Some of these systems had cassette tape drives for data storage, some 5 1/4 inch floppies, some cartridge slots like the game machines of the time. (Most notably the Atari 2600) One way that you could put programs into your computer was to type them in. If you had no cartridge in the computer it would boot to BASIC and you could start typing in your program. If you did this you wanted a tape or disk drive to store your hard work. Where did the programs come from? The magazines of the time often published articles that included type in code. Computer hobbyists would by the magazines and type in the programs. In doing so they had something else to use there computer for, but also learned a little more about how the system worked. The classic magazines of the period are Byte, Compute! and Creative Computing. (Thanks to the folks at the Classic Computer Magazine Archive some of these early magazines are available on line.)

I know what you're think, "enough already with the trip down memory lane." You're right. So what will we be looking at in this blog? There are many tools that have been designed to help students learn what programming is all about. My intention in this blog is to introduce you to some of those tools and provide you with some "type in" programs. Many of the tools have a number of available type in programs created as parts of lesson plans for using the tools to teach. Links will provided for those. I'll also provide some of my own programs for you to use with full notes on what the program is doing and why. One other thing you should know as you read this. Many of these posts will be collected and edited into articles for the Twin Cities PC User Group monthly newsletter the Digital Viking.

Starting Out
The first program we will use is called Guido van Robot or GvR for short. GvR is an adaptation of the program Karel the Robot that was written in the early 1980s as a way to teach students programming with a simplified version of the Pascal language. GvR was developed in the 2000s to do the same using the Python language. Visit the history page of the GvR site for more information on its development.

Some other programs we'll play with in the future include Alice, a java based 3D environment created at Carnegie-Mellon University, and Etoys based on the Squeak language a variant of Smalltalk. We'll add to this list. As we move forward. Please feel free to suggest other tools in the comments section.

Thanks for stopping by we'll get started with GvR in the next post.