What to do after you hit returnPeople's Computer Company.
What to do after you hit return
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3HN commenters
2010–2026first – last mentioned
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…storefront computer facilities where people (kids and adults) could rent time on a TTY connected to a computer. Most of the computers we used for that were DEC PDP-8s. One of our most popular books was What to Do After You Hit Return, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_to_Do_After_You_Hit_Retur.... It remains, to this day, a classic. Typing in a program from a magazine or book was always a crapshoot unless you really understood…
on “A Program from a 35 Year Old Magazine for BASIC Month and a Chat with Its Author” ↗1977: I learned BASIC from typing in programs in "What To Do After You Hit Return" and experimenting by changing things. On a Processor Technology SOL. My dad also had a BYTE-8 (I see that's not even in wikipedia, I think it was an IMSAI clone) and had to manually enter the machine…
On second thought, I'd suggest that you teach (that is, mentor) some very simple number games and have him program them in Python or BASIC. If you can find it, a copy of What to do after you hit return: PCC's first book of computer games or 101 Basic Games would do for a start. These games are simple, fun, and don't get cluttered up with issues of presentation versus computation logic.
on “Ask HN: My 12 year old nephew wants to make a game, how do I help him?” ↗This reminds me of mid-1970s ASCII computer graphics, except more advanced and orders of magnitude faster. In particular, it brought to mind "Mandala" from the book "What to Do After You Hit Return", which was an amazing book in 1975, full of BASIC games and graphics programs that you could type in. If you want the vibe of early home computers, take a look at this book. https://archive.org/details/Whattodoafteryouhitreturn/page/n...
on “Moiré Explorer” ↗Looks like a web implementation of the old People's Computer Company game "Bagels" published in the classic What to Do After You Hit Return: PCC's First Book of Computer Games, now long out of print. PCC materials were published under a "free to use with attribution" copyright license, an really early version of the Creative Commons idea.…
on “Pico Fermi Bagels” ↗The People's Computer Company published What to do after you hit return. It was a large format book that collected many of the games published in PCC Newspaper, People's Computers, and Recreational Computing. PCC, before the microprocessor, ran storefront computer centers…
on “BASIC Computer Games” ↗The People's Computer Company published many BASIC games in its publications (PCC Newspaper, People's Computers, Dr. Dobbs Journal, Recreational Computing) and in the book, What to Do After You Hit Return: Or, P.C.C.'s First Book of Computer Games. Many of the games were reprinted elsewhere, often without attribution.
on “A repository of “BASIC Computer Games” code in modern languages” ↗