The “famous” 10PRINT program on vintage computers was a delight for many in the 70s and 80s. It’s fun to port to other platforms and machines.

I’m always looking for calculators that can do it. It requires both a slash - ASCII character 47, and a backslash - ASCII character 92. Most calculators can print the forward slash, but the backslash is only sometimes implemented.

Modern and retro mix

One of my favorite peices of retro clone hardware is Bob Corsham’s KIM-1 Clone. I’ve featured it many places like the 6502 speed series.

I have the latest model of this board, and he made an interesting design choice. It actually has an FTDI chip on board and you use that via USB to connect via a modern computer with an FTDI driver. This is very convenient for working with a modern computer, but then eliminates the ability to use a real serial port.

My friend Robin’s favorite demo is 10 print. And what’s not to love about 10 print? After all, there’s even a book about it.

My Favorite Demo

My favorite demo is more complex but still simple enough to understand. The Maze Generator, from Compute! December 1981 by Charles Bond has been a favorite of mine since it came out. In the filing cabinet of my mind, I even remember it as the “Page 54 Maze”.

Have you ever sat down at your old Olympia typewriter and felt compelled to write poetry in which each word is the same length as successive digits of Pi?

Me too!!!

This is called a Pilish:

The idea of writing a sentence (or longer piece of poetry or prose) in which the lengths of successive words represent the digits of the number π (=3.14159265358979…) has been around since the early 1900’s. - Writing in Pilish

I’ve participated in National Novel Writing Month for the last two years. While I don’t have aspirations of being a fiction author, I think there is a ton of value in writing 1500 words daily. Good writing or bad, 45000 words in a month is worth the effort.

In 2021, I used a DOS 386 with Wordperfect 6.22 to complete the writing for the month and produced a pretty terrible Techno/Wilderness thriller that no one should be subjected to reading. Using a 386 Laptop was a fantastic experience, and WordPerfect for DOS remains one of the best distraction-free word processors ever created.

As we’ve discussed, large integer math is a pretty interesting problem, even for modern computers.

What if we wanted to add very, very, very large integers without using scientific notation, but this time let’s do it extra slowly. Extra slow… this seems like a job for BASIC!!

Strings

We’re going to need to use strings. On the Commodore BASICs of the 80s, strings have a max length of 255, so the largest sum we’ll be able to represent is:

Dealing with large numbers in computing has been an attractive problem area for a long time. Using an average calculator might lead you to believe that it’s too tricky for most applications.

But it’s not that difficult. And to prove it, we’re going to implement this calculation on machines with 8 Bit registers (I mean, cmon, on this site, you can’t even pretend to be shocked).

Quite a while ago, I started playing with random numbers on 8 Bit machines. I don’t think anyone is doing “serious” work on these machines, but playing with Ciphers and Crypto got me at least curious about how a Commodore 64 generates random numbers.

There are many ways to determine randomness. Humans are pretty good at picking out patterns in visual representations. Luckily our beloved machines have easy screen memory access. Let’s poke some random stuff to the screen and see what we see.

In mid-2021, I built a MiniPET 40/80. It’s one of the best replica kits I’ve ever seen. Even the keyboard is wonderfully awkward to use, just like a real Chicklet PET keyboard is.

Switching between ROM versions with DIP switches has been great for learning and experimenting with internals.

My only wish is that I could occasionally get a green screen out of it. I use the composite output, which is black and white (just like many original PETs), but the 7-year-old in me just loves a Green Screen PET. So I was on Twitter one day when someone (I’m sorry, I’ve forgotten who) pointed me to a small project by a chap in Spain.  This takes a monochrome VGA signal and lets you change the colors with dip switches. AND it was only 9 bucks.

What’s the 100 door problem?

It’s a just for fun problem in “beginning” math and computer courses. The idea is simple:

There are 100 closed doors in a row.

You walk past the doors 100 times (100 passes)

The first time, visit every door. If the door is closed, open it. If it is open, close it. In programming, you’d probably call this toggling the door so let’s call it that.

The Commodore 64 and PET are fairly similar systems. Other than a few memory location differences, many BASIC programs written for the Commodore 64 that don’t use graphics can run on a PET.

There is one caveat. The PET doesn’t relocate a saved BASIC program to the beginning of BASIC, like all of the Commodore lines after it. So if you find yourself trying to load a program on your PET written on one of its younger siblings, you may wonder why it loads, but you can’t find it.