My Parents' Software

[nemorathwald]

Twenty years ago, my parents wrote programs for the Commodore 64 and submitted them to Ahoy magazine and COMPUTE!'s Gazette, which would print the code in its pages and send my parents about fifty bucks. I had almost forgotten about this in the time since then, but Mom just found their programs available for download on the web, complete with screenshots and full credit to them by name. "Elfred" was a Christmas game. There was also "Dots" and "Tree Tutor for Tots". The first one was a sci-fi action game named Devastator, programmed by my Dad. The site calls it "a quirky little game that is more notable for its historical significance as one of the earliest PC games distributed with a magazine."

My parents programmed free and open source software!

Comments

[paranthropus.livejournal.com]

I used to spend hours typing in those programs from COMPUTE! magazine. Never owned a C64, though.

I used a Smith-Corona.

Not really. It was an Atari, which was a little better.

An interesting feature was that each line of code had a simple checksum. As you finished copying the line, the computer would respond with the checksum which you could quickly compare with the printed version. By using this clever method, typos were nearly eliminated.

[uplinktruck.livejournal.com]

So you are genetically predisposed to open source?

[matt-arnold.livejournal.com]

I guess I am.