> If you wanted to play one of those games, you had to type in the whole program by hand. Inevitably, you would get something wrong, so you would have to debug your program. By the time you got it working, you knew enough about how the program functioned to start modifying it yourself.
As someone who was there and did that I want to refute that assumption :) I have typed in many programs and there's not a lot to learn because most of them consisted of many pages of DATA lines and a small loop that loaded those machine instructions into the home computer's memory and started the program by a USR directive (please note that I made this explanation many years after the fact). I guess there are not many teenagers who are able to debug this kind of program by looking at the actual opcodes.
Sure you could learn a lot from typing in regular BASIC programs but that weren't the most interesting games as far as I remember. The most productive learning experience was interactive and exploratory programming a shown in the OP article.
As someone who was there and did that I want to refute that assumption :) I have typed in many programs and there's not a lot to learn because most of them consisted of many pages of DATA lines and a small loop that loaded those machine instructions into the home computer's memory and started the program by a USR directive (please note that I made this explanation many years after the fact). I guess there are not many teenagers who are able to debug this kind of program by looking at the actual opcodes.
Sure you could learn a lot from typing in regular BASIC programs but that weren't the most interesting games as far as I remember. The most productive learning experience was interactive and exploratory programming a shown in the OP article.