Operating an 8-bit machine was an excursion of discovery, characterized by repeated stabs in the dark and valuable little hand-holding. The Commodore 64, potentially the best-selling computer model ever and thirty years old this month, presented you with a blue screen featuring the message “38911 BASIC BYTES FREE. READY.”
Prepared for what? Prepared for code. Clacking away at the keyboard in a language the machine understood (in this case BASIC) was the sole ways in which you might have interaction with it. It seems just about silly today as we point, click, swipe and pinch our way through rich graphical user interfaces, but the user-unfriendliness of the Commodore 64 and its cousins taught a generation of fans how to programme. “It was the beginning of a new age,” announces Jeff Minter, legendary games programmer whose reputation was cemented by his work for the Commodore 64. “It opened up worlds of creativeness to folk who otherwise might never have found them.”
The Commodore 64 debuted at the Electronics Show in Vegas in Jan 1982 to gasps of disbelief from competing technology firms. Its graphic and sonic capabilities appeared way beyond its $595 price tag, and when it became available in the States in August that year it quickly beat the opposition. An assertive marketing campaign saw it appear on the shelves of toy and department stores, making a contribution to a steep decline in the popularity of games boxes but while gaming was its main selling point, you could do so much more.
“There was a massive fervour for coding back then, for pushing the limits of the machine,” asserts one previous Commodore 64 owner, Steve Harcourt. “It was relatively straightforward to code for, and there were a vast quantity of details available about its internal structure.” It may well have been state-of-the-art, but you might become conversant with its every intricacy if you were content to put the hours in. And many of us were. “The space between the people who made the games and the people playing them was not that big,” says Minter. “It was the meaning of autonomy. The programmers were a lot like you.”
Minter’s games for the Commodore 64,eg Attack Of The Mutant Camels and Sheep In Space, were ground-breaking and hugely popular (the former is shortly to be exhibited at the Smithsonian Museum), but he was also only one member of an expanding Commodore 64 community. Compunet, an early UK interactive service accessed through a Commodore 64 and a painfully slow modem, brought that community closer together. “It offered BBs and software downloads,” announces Harcourt. “This inspired us to code, and it galvanized a deeper enthusiasm for the machine beyond casual gaming.”
“Compunet was fantastic,” agrees Minter. “You could upload these little demos of what you’d been working on, and that was a really nice social scene years before the internet.”
That passion to outdo one another, joined with the constraints of the machine itself, inspired truly creative programming. It’s prominent that during the current wave of nostalgia generated by the 30th anniversaries of the Commodore 64, the BBC Micro and other machines, the people that learned to programme in the early 1980s are all grateful for being in the right spot at the right time.
“I taught myself BBC Basic, and when I was 15 I was writing programs like disk sector editors,” says It consultant Simon Guerrero. “Even if you were just playing games you had to procure at least a basic experience of OS operations but now all you have got to do is choose menu options.”
The current statement by Secretary of the state for Education, Michael Gove, the ICT syllabus is to switch from administrative skills (spreadsheets, mail combines and the like) to “proper” computer science is one that recognises a growing ignorance of PC languages. It is a move welcomed by computer scientist Dr Sue Black, who recently set up the Goto Foundation in an attempt to spark curiosity in what is going on under the bonnet of modern computers. “What we need is a lot of techniques of making programming accessible to folk so it doesn’t shock them off,” she is saying. “I went into computing because I thought that it was so exciting, but over the years as an educational I’ve discovered that folk outside the industry equate computing with negative stuff you know, like govt overspends on IT projects and such like. But such a lot of the world around us depends on computers. And our natural curiosity in puzzles and problem-solving can simply be channelled into coding.”
But it’s going to be a difficult battle to re-kindle an interest in coding that was likely at its peak 30 years ago, when machines like the Commodore 64 just sat there awaiting directions. “The link between code and creativeness is one I think we should truly stress, and one that we seem to have lost a bit,” asserts Hannah Dee, lecturer in PC science at Aberystwyth College. “When you teach somebody a programming language these days they want to build large stuff, and there are ways to make that simpler by employing programming tools like Visible Studio. But you can end up teaching students how to use the tools, rather than how to programme. Programming truly is building stuff out of concepts like magic.”
Jeff Minter has an analogous view. “I always considered programming as being like modern-day wizardry,” he says. “You could think about things in your brain and then make them happen.”
But in a time where our computers do not need any understanding of underlying architecture or parts, and PC science is still said to be an extraordinarily uncool subject contrasted to arts and media, how will a new generation of computer wizards discover their true calling? “If you want to play with programming,” claims Dee, “there are ways and method of doing it on any old computer you can start web programming (in Serbian : web programiranje) with Internet Explorer and Notepad.” Indeed, the site codeacademy.com has shown that there is a hunger for this sort of data, with three hundred thousand folks currently learning how to programme in JavaScript via its Code Year initiative.
But it may be the graceful, keyboardless smartphone that finishes up enticing out our inner geek. Craig Lockwood, previous Commodore 64 owner and founder of appworkshops.com, has been teaching app development for just over twelve months and saw interest building continuously. “Everyone has a concept for an app,” he says, “and almost everyone has a device for running them. I’ve been teaching youngsters as young as 9 about coding, beginning with a programmable toy Giant Trak that shows them that they can control devices using set procedures . That’s the building blocks of coding.”
Jeff Minter sees a parallel between app coding and his own early efforts. “Once you get over the obstacle of how it’s possible to get something on the screen it is not that difficult to make programs and share them with your pals. It might end up being today’s equivalent of the Commodore 64 community that we had back in the early 1980s”, writes tagza.com.
