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Re:A Program from a 35 Year Old Magazine for BASIC Month and... by ilamont on Wednesday October 04, 2017 @08:16PM (#15405902)
There are lots of people like this with fascinating stories to tell about being the first programmer or systems specialist at a company back in the 70s or 80s or early 90s. Sometimes people share their stories right here on HN and they are always a joy to read (well, at least for me). So many internal and external dynamics at the companies as they transitioned to using software, databases, etc. For the people running the tech, there were huge challenges, yet there were also opportunities to grow.

Incidentally, I used to try out some of the BASIC programs in the magazines (usually the shorter ones) on my VIC 20 but I rarely got them to work. Not sure if that was a result of a typo on the printed page, or a typo on my screen, but when I did get something to run, it really felt like an accomplishment.

Re:A Program from a 35 Year Old Magazine for BASIC Month and... by tluyben2 on Thursday October 05, 2017 @06:06AM (#15407933)
Because I was young and did not have much pocket money, I would get only the cheap magazines which were written, printed and carefully stapled by a bunch of volunteers. They usually had unclear characters, so you had to debug it. Which was annoying then, but great in hindsight.