this post was submitted on 27 Jul 2024
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You just missed the golden era of the VIC-20, when you had to walk over to the house of the friend that had one and type in the BASIC code for a game before you could play it, since it didn't originally have a hard drive and the friend's mom was too cheap to buy a tape drive or any game cartridges.
Haha my dad had a vic20 and he has told me a story almost exactly like that
I had a Texas Instruments 99/4A, and my parents were also too cheap to buy a tape drive! Typing in pages and pages of inscrutable BASIC (endless lines of DATA in hex for sounds or graphics) only to find out at the end that you made a mistake somewhere and it's broken or glitchy or just won't run. Pretty sure I have PTSD from those days!
I actually did my very first programming with punch cards on a mainframe, thanks to an older neighbor friend who was auditing a comp sci class at the local university (this was the late '70s and they were still teaching intro classes with punch cards). Even worse than typing out BASIC and seeing if it ran correctly was poking holes in a bunch of cards, depositing them in your slot in the basement of the computer science building, and then picking up your inch-thick printout three days later to find out what you'd fucked up. Typing games into that VIC-20 seemed like heaven in comparison.