Compute!'s Gazette first began offering BASIC programs to type in. These became more elaborate over time, and then they announced a revolutionary concept: they began publishing programs written in machine language, for maximum compactness and performance.

But alongside these machine-language programs, they published a short BASIC editor, and this is how you typed in the machine code. It was all numbers, and the editor program would calculate the CRC, and it could flag typos, so you could re-enter the bad lines. That was way better than arduously entering DATA statements in BASIC, or just having a malfunction because of a typo in those programs.

This stuff was all rather magical for me. At first I didn't even have a storage device. I'd type in short BASIC programs, shut off the machine, and they'd be wiped: gone forever. Of course, with the Commodore computers, there was always an option to purchase cartridge-based software that was durable.

Eventually I had a Datasette cassette recorder, so I could save those programs I'd typed in. It was quite amazing to be able to finally save my own stuff, or the magazine programs.