this post was submitted on 14 May 2026
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me_irl
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I wrote a program in Basic on my Commodore 64 at 6.
I didn’t know how to save my work. I typed and manually proofread code for three hours. It worked. The program was lost when I powered it down.
My brother in arms….
Our Commodore VIC20 came with a big book/manual which mostly taught you how to code. Was an awesome time.
Veronica Explains has a great video on how manuals used to actually be great resources.
Manuals still are fantastic when available.
Yeah the “OS” was essentially a basic interpreter and simple editor. I remember that book.
And trying to save your program on a cassette that would give you an error after 30 minutes.
Save? A program? What kind of magic is this?
I wrote basic on my Apple IIe.
I was all Apple/Mac until 1998 when I built a Windows gaming pc with high school graduation money. Learned to code in art school, after which I switched back to Macs when they went intel, built annoying but fun flash ads and games in AS2 (ECMAscript essentially), then when the iPhone came out I switched to hand coding HTML/CSS/JS web apps and got out of advertising.
Then learned Ruby/Sinatra/Rails/Haml/SASS and did straight web dev into the early days of both React, Angular and Vue. Then quit to do a tech startup with robots.
Now I CAD model original designs for fabrication projects, 3D printing and custom automotive designs.
So I’m pretty technically inclined, but I own 4 Macs, 3 Rpis, dozens of physical computing platforms, and a metric ton of salvaged sensors and ex-RadioShack components.
I think it was pretty common back then to have no way to save. Spectrum zx. Amstrad 464. They didn’t initially have a media to save to. Then cassette tapes could be used. Software piracy was recording the tape, like copying a song.
Yeah, my first was a little Timex Sinclair and it didn't have any media. But each button on the keyboard had a Basic command as an alt key, so I taught myself Basic with it. Many years later I got my BS in Computer Science, so I think it was a pretty worthwhile little computer.
I knew someone who had one for a while. He got rid of it after a few months because the modular design wasn't locking the modules well and would reboot
It’s like looking at a mirror. Only it was a Sharp HotBit (a Brazilian computer) and I was 7 or 8.
Do you remember what the program did?
Holy crap, I did the same thing! My dad taught me the Random function (RND), which blew my mind. I tried creating a dungeon crawler text based game with random rooms. It was going to be awesome.
fk ya. it will be.
TI-99/4a for me, but after the first big loss of something that worked is when I found out there was a cassette adapter. My parents did not buy it new, it was maybe 5 or 6 years old by then, so finding a cassette adapter took some effort.
Worth it though IMO.
Heh, I was going to comment on my first being a C64 (technically a Vic 20 is the first I ever messed with, but I don't really remember that one).