Graybeards like me remember trying to painstakingly type source code from a magazine. This is a very accurate account of what a young computer user in 1986 needed to do to get a new game for the Commodore 64, complete with an immersive emulation.
It’s time to install an app! But here in 1986, we still call them “programs,” not apps. So, you’ll want to set aside some time to get started installing a program.
Great article – it’s crazy to think the dedication that went into “getting” software for the C64. The closest I ever came was typing in a ca. 60 line COM file-copying utility from a computer magazine. I didn’t have a C64 back in the day; my first computer at the age of around 7 was a used IBM PS/2 Model 30 with MCGA graphics (technically could do 256 colors but for all intents and purposes it was CGA because no games actually supported it), a 20MB hard drive, 8086 processor, a whopping 640KB of RAM and a 720KB single-density 3,5″ not-actually-floppy disk drive. I got almost all my software from a mail-order shareware catalog, which at the time was a kind of underground tip. We never had a lot of games, though we did have Tetris, Spaceflight (it had come with the computer from the previous owner, but I never delved too deeply into it for some reason), one of the early King’s Quest games (copied from a friend), Caveman Ugh-lympics (ran too slow to properly play) and of course, Nibbles (Snake) and Gorillas (like a very basic version of Worms) as provided by QBasic on MS-DOS 6.22, which were always fun.little time-wasters. The sound/music abilities were limited to bleeps from the PC speaker, one bleep at a time, no polyphony, although there was a shareware program that let you simulate polyphonic music by rapidly cycling notes (this completely tied up the CPU so you couldn’t do anything else in parallel). The most used programs were the word processor -PFS First Choice – a very simple yet. distraction-free writing experience, and Print master 1.0, which at the time was basically unknown and could only handle very blocky graphics even though our printer could actually do a bit better. I vividly remember laying out documents with reserved spaces In First Choice (not quite WYSIWYG but close enough) in order to print normal text, and then re-inserting the paper and using PrintMaster to add graphics. It was an error-prone process but I was a nerd so it was worth it to me.
Once we got our first “proper” computer in 1995, a Gateway tower Pentium 90 with 700MB hard drive and a whopping 8MB of RAM, initially running Windows for Workgroups 3.11, not to mention AOL, the amount of things to do exploded and I got increasingly distracted from my schoolwork. Even all the little colorful icons on Microsoft Works were distracting when all I wanted to do was write a paper – TextArt! ClipArt! etc.. At least my computer affinity eventually paid off with a job in the field…