I've been diving into both modern and vintage programming, and I often come across these lengthy DATA statements in BASIC listings from computing magazines of the 80s. Sometimes, these listings stretch for pages and have multiple items per line. This makes me wonder if this was really the original source code, or if there were graphics programs or even assembly code involved that got converted into these huge numbers of DATA statements just for magazine printing. Is there any truth to this?
5 Answers
The mid-80s really kicked off home-computer pixel graphics programs. And back then, if you had a data file, how could you even share it without a floppy disk? They were just trying to print what they could! Check out Dazzle Draw if you're curious.
Yeah, a lot of that coding was for assembly and graphical data. I remember Compute! magazine had this utility that let you input code in hexadecimal, which made it way faster than typing out DATA statements. Plus, it helped avoid typos that could crash your program since there was a checksum to verify correctness.
Most of those examples were just assembly code or graphic/sound data. You could take a working software piece, dump it out in hex or decimal, and voilà—DATA statements fit for a magazine!
Back in the day, we definitely coded like that. If we didn’t have the right tools, we were manually converting everything to DATA statements after drawing sprites on paper. We were just thrilled to be doing it. It’s weird looking back, but the goal wasn't to speed things up—it was all about the excitement of creating something with just what you had at hand!
Same here! I started with MS Basic on my XT. I’d write everything line by line. It’s amazing how far we've come from those days!
You’re likely right! They probably used some development tools to handle things like character graphics or assembly routines. Or who knows, maybe they just communicated in a super technical way, like "Data one one, zero, one one, zero, zero..."!
Haha, programming does feel like magic to outsiders! Back then, we used squared paper to design our graphics. No magic there!
I totally relate! I grew up using C64, and we didn’t have fancy editors. You entered everything line by line, and memory was organized by line numbers. It was bare metal coding, no libraries whatsoever!