Atari 2600 BASIC Programming (2015)

As a kid, I had the hardest time understanding what a computer was. At 9 years old in 1977, I had a friend whose dad was a computer programmer. The friend tried to explain to me what a computer was, but I just couldn't understand it. We even took a field trip to a National Weather Service office where they talked a lot about their computers and showed us one that filled a room, but I still didn't understand. None of the explanations made it sound like anything other than magic happening in a big set of boxes.

At 12 years old in 1980, I bought Atari BASIC Programming (it wasn't yet called the 2600). Minutes after plugging it in, the idea of a computer clicked for me. That quickly led to getting bored with that game system and convincing my parents to buy me a "real" computer. Eventually that led to a long career as a software developer. Thanks for opening that door for me Atari BASIC Programming!

This was my first "computer"! I begged my parents for this after getting a taste of a Vic 20 and wanting some of that for myself.

That was a false start, to say the least. There isn't a whole lot you can do with 64 bytes. After that, I begged for a Timex Sinclair 1000. 16KB of RAM isn't a whole lot, either, but it was enough to actually experiment and learn.

I will be honest and admit that I don’t find most Atari 2600 games to actually be fun; there’s a few gems like Warlords and and Pitfall and Pitfall 2, but I don’t think that home console games started getting really good until the Colecovision.

That said, I am perpetually amazed at what some people have been able to pull off on such a weak device. 120 bytes is nothing for memory compared to anything I have written on a modern computer; I worked very hard to optimize the shit out of my custom Swaybar, and that still took about 500kb.

The fact that games on the 2600 could even be playable is sort of an achievement in its own right, and when you see games that are actually legitimately decent (like the cassette tape version of Frogger, for example), I feel a bit of envy that I will never be that good at software.

BASIC Programming on the 2600 is similarly impressive to me. It’s not “fun” in any kind of objective sense, you can’t really do a lot with it, but the fact that there exists a programming environment in any capacity running directly on there is an impressive bit of engineering.

In any programming language it's an interesting challenge to fit an entire functional program into under 140 characters.

APL: challenge accepted

https://aplwiki.com/wiki/Conway's_Game_of_Life

A quick search has not found any implementations of an APL-family language on the 2600, so let this comment be an inspiration for one of you madlads out there to actually do it. The 2600 has only 128B of RAM, but a lot of consoles around this era had additional bankswitched RAM on the cartridges.