I’ve paused updating this site to focus instead on my primary domain over at . You can still read what crazy program I’ve published this month. Even better, read a few other articles!

July’s program is indicative of the BASIC programs you’d find in early programming manuals. Most books start out with pretty basic commands such as PRINT and INPUT . A Story mimics these early programs in a creative way. Similar to Mad Libs, you answer a series of questions and the program, well, tells you a story.

A Story is one of the first programs I wrote. In fact it was the second program in my notebook that I used to write programs for my school’s DEC. My 6th grade computer club teacher gave me a BASIC programming manual and I promptly went home and wrote a few programs using it. I would quickly progress beyond these few simple programs, but is still fun looking back at these early attempts.

Due to my lack of skill back then, the story is pretty static. You might, however, recognize the character it depicts. As a child of the eighties, there was a certain yellow character that dominated my programs and this one is no different. Primitive code aside, the story works well and the ZX81 could easily handle my early coding. Other than some better screen management commands, the program closely matches my original.