Jeff Atwood has a post today talking about coding BASIC on old-school computers (specifically, the Atari 2600). It really made me nostalgic for when I got started programming on my Commodore Vic 20. Ahh, what a system that was.

It was a great machine. It had a whopping 5 K of memory (yes, Kilobytes, not megabytes), and the "operating system" was Basi, burned onto the ROM. About 1.2K of the system memory was taken up by basic, so you had 3.8 k left for programs. Once you typed in your code, you could save it to the external tape drive (a cassette recorder). 3.8 K took around a half hour to write to tape.

I spent hours and hours on that little machine, putting it through its paces. I played through the Scott Adams adventure games, and the family still chuckes at the magic words "Say Yoho" from Pirate Adventure.  I learned basic, and just about memorized memory locations for poke and peek. That little machine started me on my way to geekdom.

I was overjoyed to find  the Vic 20 programming manual online. Check it out, nostalgic geeks!