{"id":213,"date":"2006-10-23T10:19:23","date_gmt":"2006-10-23T15:19:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/?p=213"},"modified":"2006-10-23T10:28:24","modified_gmt":"2006-10-23T15:28:24","slug":"retro-scan-of-the-week-exciting-computer-magazine-excerpt","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/index.php\/archives\/213\/retro-scan-of-the-week-exciting-computer-magazine-excerpt","title":{"rendered":"<span id=\"retro_color\">Retro Scan of the Week:<\/span> Some Like it Hex"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"caption\"><a href=\"\/wp-content\/images\/retroscan\/hexlovers_large.jpg\" target=\"new\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"\/wp-content\/images\/retroscan\/hexlovers_small.jpg\" alt=\"Hex Magazine Program Listing\" class=\"centered\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<div class=\"caption_text\">If you think computer magazines are dry these days, try this.  I recently picked up a Compute Gazette from 1988 and there were dozens of pages of hex data listings just like this.  Enthralled, I spent hours reading the incredible tale of a robot and his journey to Alpha Epsilon 7.<\/p>\n<p>But seriously, what we have here is part of one of them old-fashioned program listings.  They were extremely common in computer magazines back in the day.  The magazines published the code (usually BASIC) for select programs they bought the rights to (from typically amateur programmers) and readers typed them into their computers themselves if they were interested.  It&#8217;s one of those things that inspires computer old timers to pull out their grandpa hats and start lecturin&#8217; youth about how easy they have it these days:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>You know what, sonny?!  I was typin&#8217; in programs before you were even a twinkle in yer mammy&#8217;s eye.  Back in my day, we didn&#8217;t get software on <em>disks<\/em> or any of that <em>nonsense<\/em>.  We bought it on paper and had to type it all in ourselves.  Twenty million lines of code!  After typing fifteen hours nonstop, our fingers would be bleeding so bad that we&#8217;d have to use our toes.  After that the family would work in shifts around the clock until we finally had a running version of a dumb word processor.  <em>Without spell check.<\/em>  It had three-hundred bugs in it and barely ran, but by golly, we liked it!<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><small><em>If you use this image on your site, please support &#8220;Retro Scan of the Week&#8221; by giving us obvious credit for the original scan and entry.  Thanks.<\/em><\/small><\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>If you think computer magazines are dry these days, try this. I recently picked up a Compute Gazette from 1988 and there were dozens of pages of hex data listings just like this. Enthralled, I spent hours reading the incredible tale of a robot and his journey to Alpha Epsilon 7. But seriously, what we [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,24,26],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-213","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computer-info-and-history","category-humor","category-retro-scan-of-the-week"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/213","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=213"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/213\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=213"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=213"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=213"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}