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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

What’s the 100 door problem?

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

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.