Uborne Children's Books Release For Free Computer Books From the '80s (usborne.com) 119
martiniturbide writes: To promote some new computer coding books for kids, Uborne Children's Books has put online 15 of its children books from the '80s to learn how to code games. The books are available for free in PDF format and has samples to create your game for Commodore 64, VIC 20, Apple, TRS 80, Spectrum and other. Maybe you read some of them like "Machine Code for Beginners" or "Write your own Adventure Program for MicroComputers." Should other publishers also start to make their '80s and '90s computer books available for free?
see Spot Dick Jane (Score:2)
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MS PEEK and POKE at work, eh?
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Usborne (Score:1)
Errm it is Usborne not Uborne.
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Usborne (Score:4, Informative)
I know editors don't actually do any editing, but come on...
Re:Usborne (Score:4, Informative)
I actually read that initially as "Unborn Children's Books", and thought this was about audio books meant to play through those womb speakers.
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You can if you don't need to see the words and pictures.
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If my memory serves me, you could download a free version of Visual Basic "Lite" from common dial-up services of the day, and it was bundled with certain VB books. I don't remember what Microsoft called it exactly; it might be this thing:
http://news.microsoft.com/1996... [microsoft.com]
It supported a subset of traditional BASIC, but I never heavily tested backward compatibility.
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Microsoft used to have a proper BASIC interpreter/editor in DOS - which worked well under windows 95. I think it was called MSBasic. I wrote my first post-LOGO programs using MSBasic and the user's manual from a long-discarded commodore-64. Peek and Poke stuff were not useful (completely different memory layout) but the rest was - and there were other ways to do graphics.
Re: tom (Score:2)
There was QBASIC (later quickbasic... or they just really hid the full name for early versions) and before that GW-BASIC.
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Windows 95 came with QBasic built in. QBaisic was a more advanced version of GW-Basic/BasicA that was part of the original IBM PC. It was basically an interpreter only version of Microsoft's QuickBasic. It believe it was was introduced with the release of DOS 5.0. It featured the 1985 ANSI extensions (no line numbers necessary, long variable names, and labels), but it was fully backwards compatible with GW-Basic. It was a DOS program, so it was never promoted or advertised as a feature of Windows 95, but it
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This.
I'm sure the vast majority of nerds are decent human beings - but misogynistic assholes like him make me doubt that some times... must be the significant minority of libertarian-leaning randroids among the nerd community. Nothing guarantees turning into a terrible person quite like thinking Ayn Rand was right about something. Frankly - her belief that smoking is proof of man's superiority over fire and that scientific evidence linking smoking to cancer is a "communist conspiracy" was exactly typical o
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99% of the people who support her views haven't read Atlas Shrugged. I'd reckon it's about the same for those who are against them.
Because (the odd sparkle aside) it's bloody hard going and not very coherent either.
Disclaimer: read it because I had to, or I wouldn't have.
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You blame women for the changing nature of programming and resent them being educated, and "somehow" that makes you a 'misogynistic pig'. No, makes no sense to me either.
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Indeed. The Win95 familly (95, 98, 98SE, Me) also come with GORILLA.BAS preinstalled, a game written in BASIC. Earlier versions also came with DONKEY.BAS, a driving game written by Bill Gates.
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I remember hacking the code for GORILLA.BAS to make it behave differently, like increasing or decreasing gravity - which could make Bananas go to orbit... or hit the building immediately beneath you like a stinger missile..
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gorilla.bas goes as far back as MS-DOS 5, and there was also nibbles.bas which was a worm/snakerace/Tron lightbike type of game. They were fun and educational.
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but it was fully backwards compatible with GW-Basic
No it wasn't. I had to install GWBASIC separately from a DOS 4 install disk after upgrading to DOS 5, because the Chain Reaction GWBASIC game didn't work with QBASIC.
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No it's not. If you're a journalist, or even pretending to be, you ought to be more competent.
Editors, what the fuck do you do all day? (Score:1)
Honestly, what?
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The Internet is for porn?
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The Internet is for porn?
Why is that even a question...
Yes (Score:3)
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These books were great! As a kid, I had the Computer Battlegames one, which had very simplistic but easy to understand programs, and the Write Your Own Adventure Games one with the Haunted House. They did a good job explaining how to write the game, how the parser works, how to set the level up in memory, etc. Much better than other books that had program listings only, where you didn't have a clue what anything did. Nice artwork too.
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I'd love free copies of The Art of Programming by Knuth, or any of the K, R, or P books. Maybe even Bjorne.
I found TAOP in a bookshop in Seattle last week for two hundred and something dollars. I resisted buying it, because I had other things to spend the money on. Free would have been nice, but I don't think they'll be giving it away any time soon.
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I'm surprised you didn't ask for a flying pony as well.
Wasn't the C64 just a BASIC interpreter anyways? (Score:2)
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I learned to program primarily on Radio Shack machines (MC-10 and Color Computer, boy that brings back memories). I found the GWBASIC/QBasic interpreters fairly close to the old Tandy/RS variants of Microsoft BASIC. The Commodore interpreter, which was also an MS BASIC variant, still seemed to have some oddities.
The problem with gaming was of course that every microcomputer had its own graphics engine, so it made porting incredibly complex in many cases. Since we're talking about computers that had, at most
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Anyone remember that wireframe rolling ball demo for GWBASIC (?) that looked tron-esque? It used the 4 graphics pages to give the illusion of rolling.
IIRC the land showed lines getting closer together to simulate distance.
* http://www.abandonia.com/files... [abandonia.com]
The ball wasn't transparent -- it used hidden line removal IIRC.
* https://s-media-cache-ak0.pini... [pinimg.com]
Now-a-days we would use a wireframe like this:
* http://eleganthack.com/wp-cont... [eleganthack.com]
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You're not talking about the Boing Ball [youtube.com] are you? A demo for the Amiga written to show off its graphics capabilities.
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Thanks, but nope, that was a different demo on a different platform.
The one I'm talking about specifically ran on BASCI and early PC's between ~1984 .. 1990. Some of the machines didn't support the 4 graphic pages so it didn't work on all machines. It might have also been a specialized GWBASIC version of BASIC for that PC.
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Yes and no. GW-BASIC and especially QBASIC had their own way of doing things, but they were essentially backwards compatible with the the 8-bit Microsoft basic found on Apple, TRS-80, and many other microcomputers of the era (as long as you didn't do machine specific graphics and sound).
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it's funny, but when you think about it, all those BASICs were written by.... Microsoft.
Microsoft BASIC was built-in for most computers of the 80s, the exception being Apple which was a separate product and distinct from integer BASIC b
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In order to use some of the more interesting features of BASIC on the C64 you had to POKE to and PEEK from very specific memory locations.
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Notably, there were no graphics and sound primitives whatsoever in C64 BASIC. If you wanted to take advantage of the (actually quite impressive, for the day) graphics and sound, you had to directly manipulate memory.
Fortunately, you could get excellent books on machine code for 6502 CPUs, written in a style that would appeal to children.
These days you get scratch.
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Same was true for the Apple ][ Basic (I grew up with an Apple IIc then we upgraded to a IIGS when the logic board failed).
I remember the AppleIIGS came with a manual with all the memory locations and what they did. It was trivial to do PEEK and POKE commands to get access to the mouse subsystem or the high-res graphics system (thank god they mapped the PLOT commands to be able to use the high-res graphics system.. it would have been brutal to POKE for every dot on the screen).
Being a bored kid in elementar
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As someone else pointed out, a C64 emulator could make the point unimportant.
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That is a really good point that I overlooked. When I wrote BASIC on the C64 I didn't go nearly that far (but that says lots about how little I did with BASIC on the C64 and nothing about doing anything clever to not need those features). That said, if these were "programming for kids" type books would they go to that level?
Follow the link and read the book on machine code. Yes it goes to that level.
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In order to use some of the more interesting features of BASIC on the C64 you had to POKE to and PEEK from very specific memory locations.
53280 and 53281 controlled the screen and border colours.
:-)
POKE 53280,0
POKE 53281,0
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Naw, you could do some serious programming with assembly language. They had assemblers and everything.
But I simply can NOT imagine any code for the primitive computers of that day (esp. a Trash-80!) being useful at all for a kid. There's nothing to run the stuff on even if you did finally get it typed in, and no way in hell is anyone (short of a supreme expert running on a hell of a good emulator) gonna port any of that stuff to a modern PC. Hell, have you even tried to FIND a BASIC interpreter for Windo
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Only if you target a common sub-set of language features. Each vendor offered specific features or extensions. For example, if the source relied on direct memory calls for special or fancy stuff, those won't likely match up to another vendor's dialect.
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The original poster said nothing about having familiarity with 8-bit computers. I don't understand your complaint.
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Given the context - 1980s computers - I'd take it as read.
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Asking about 80's computers and knowing about 80's computers are two different things. I've read the original post 4 times. There is nothing objectively wrong with my reply. I will agree there are perhaps valid alternative interpretations, but that's no reason to complain about my interpretation in such a rude way. If someone by chance interprets it different, they can give a re-phrasing of it based on how they interpret it. No reason to rudely accuse the other person of reading it wrong.
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To again state the obvious, a lot of /.ers are too young to have had machines like this.
LK
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And in these books (yes, I still have them!) you often found a page or two at the back with a set of corrections to make the program work with the BASIC dialects of different machines (Spectrum, TIMEX, ZX80/81, Commodore 64, Commodore Pet, BBC, TRS-80, Apricot, Dragon, Oric, etc.). The sheer diversity is something I miss now it's all generic Intel.
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I'm probably missing out on something but couldn't most of the C64 code be run on most other BASIC interpreters as well? Especially if the code was intended to be child / introductory level?
Much of it probably could. Peek and poke graphics would get interesting though ...
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> couldn't most of the C64 code be run on most other BASIC interpreters as well?
No. 'BASIC' is not one language but is many different variations with some vague similarities. Some require and use line numbers, some require that there be no line numbers and have 'labels'. Some only allow single letter plus number variable names, some allow long names. The interesting bits are machine specific extensions and addresses unique to a particular computer model. The methods of displaying graphics are also differ
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jeesus reading the comments to this question makes me feel old, and also sad that there is such bad information given to the op
yes if you stay away from peeks, pokes, graphics, sound, joystic / paddle io, and the charater set of the C64 they are mostly portable, until they are not cause the methods have different names on different computers depending on if they were keeping compatibility with some pre MS BASIC (such as apple, tandy commie and just about everyone else)
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well the really simple stuff sure.
anything with an ounce of graphcis and it will pretty much run only with whatever it was intended for.
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I'm pretty sure cursing the editors is part of our community here.
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People live a long time these days, and a work of fiction or of history doesn't become suddenly irrelevant like a technical book on a narrow topic. Maybe we should have 25-year copyright with optional 10-year extensions which must be actively filed up to a maximum of 75 years?
Many books are already available ... (Score:3)
Go to the Atari Archives or Don Lancaster's web page and you'll find many of the classic computer books from the 80's. There are other sites which feature old computer books, all with permission of the rights holder.
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Huh. I wonder if one of the old Atari books from my childhood would be there. I spent many curious hours reading one that my godmother gave me, full of games and other programs for the Atari. Only reading, you see, because the Atari I owned was the 2600 game console, no programming possible. I still enjoyed reading the book and imagining playing the games, though.
So that's the book I lost for "Haunted House" (Score:4, Interesting)
I remember typing in the "Haunted House" by hand from Write your own adventure programs for your microcomputer" [google.com]
The games I wrote never looked like anything the pretty illustrations -- I imagine they helped sell the book. :-)
those were the days (Score:3)
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Sounds like a fairly good learning experience even if you were disappointed with the game design.
I used to write my own games, watch my brother play and find holes in them and chew me out:
Bro: "Hey, why does the robot say 'meow' when it crashes into rocks? Dontcha know what a @#& robot is?"
Me: "Hey, I'm new at this; do I look like Atari to you?"
Bro: "Atari didn't get big by making meowing robots."
Me: "How did your mouth get big?"
Ah, the good 'ol days...
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After entering page after page of code only to have it not work, we found, the back of the book, a small note about how the authors intentionally left errors in the code that you had to troubleshoot.
'Hey Bob, this doesn't even compile! You know the print deadline is tonight, right?'
'Sorry, I'm going bowling at 6. Just stick a note in the back saying we made some deliberate errors. Nobody will ever type the whole thing in anyway.'
Pascal? (Score:1)
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Its all BASIC. Spent about thirty minutes translating into Ada, for funsies. So you should be good to go for Pascal. Have fun!
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Considering the "useful lifespan" of tech books varies from 3 to 5 years, ALL such older books should become free PDF downloads. "Fun with Your Apple ][", "Windows 98 for Dummies" and "Solaris 2.x for Managers" are completely obsolete. Almost all the Python 2 books become antiques with Python 3 growing - ok, maybe not the best example (but better than Perl 6 which has been 20 years in Promiseland). Most often, by now, the hardware to run the examples is dead and the compilers or software very hard to find.
I still need my Apple ][ reference manual to remind me of the memory map in my Apple ][. I remember books that existed back then that seem to have been lost to entropy.
This brings to mind Penny Power (Score:1)
I remember trying to get the Basic programs printed in Penny Power (and later renamed to Zillions) magazine to run on our IBM PC clone in various Basic versions (a, qw, etc). Holy shit was that frustrating. At least you can do copy and paste now. Though to really feel the pain of the past kids need to type all that in by hand!
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We used to work in a rota - one reading, one typing, one resting.
How I got my start (Score:3)
I had that old 'Creepy Computer Games' book. I still might somewhere - I think I saw it in a box a couple of years ago.
That's really what got me excited about computers, and I remember being amazed that I could make the magic box do what I wanted it to.
I had so much fun playing Zork on my Sanyo MBC-555, that being able to actually make the computer do what I wanted, and to write my 'own' games on it, was just astounding.
I might have to go through it again. I doubt re-writing the behavior now would be more than a short exercise, but it might be interesting to see how it goes trying to translate them.
Book I'd like to be able to buy... (Score:1)
Cover Art (Score:2)
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Did that wish motivate you to be more involved with computers than you were?
Did you ever take any steps to turn your wish into reality?
Those early games and (promo) graphics were there to push us forward. To embrace, to learn, and to exceed what was done before us. And we have.
So did you wish, or did you do?
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After BASIC I kept going with programming through my teen years with Pascal, at uni I thought I wanted to study chemistry but had an elective in computer science, and soon
Creepy Computer Games (Score:1)
My first programming book. Still have it.
Publisher of some of my favorites (Score:2)
The illustrations in Usborne's 1980s books are top notch. I don't think I read these particular ones, but I loved checking them out from my grade-school library.
English please (Score:2)
Uborne Children's Books has put online 15 of its children books from the '80s to learn how to code games.
"Children books"?
The books have been put online so that they (the books) can learn how to code games?
Also it's Usborne, not "Uborne." Yeesh.
O'Reilly / Safari already does this (Score:1)
Comment (Score:1)
I had one of these books growing up! I recognize which one, too. https://drive.google.com/open?... [google.com] "Introduction to Computer Programming: BASIC for Beginners." I loved programming in QuickBASIC 4.5 (and then QBX, or 7.1). I am a sysadmin now, not a programmer, but I definitely got my love of computers from stuff like this.
Another good set of cherished computer books from my childhood was the Micro Adventure series: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]