Weblog of a “Switcher”

I was listening to This Week in Tech this morning and aside from some other rather weird discussions that had little to do with technology (in my opinion) they talked about the Internet Archive and more specifically the World Wide Web Wayback Machine. So I did a little digging and found my original first post as a blogger.

07-30-2000 - First Day!

The Wayback Machine has links to all my older web pages, or at least a lot of them. I actually thought that I had started posting blog posts earlier than 2000, but since the post "First Day!" has that title, I pretty much have to assume that the post was, in fact, the first one I had ever made.

Over time, as I switched to many different blogging software programs, I lost a lot of my older posts. This archive makes me wonder if I could recover most of my older posts. I'll have to research this some and see. If I do try to recover them, they will have to go to a different blog since they don't have a lot of posts about switching to a Mac in my past blogging.

Still, quite fun to look back.

written by Dave M. \\ tags: archive, machine, wayback, web

As I was doing my usual RSS Feed scan, I came across an article that talked about the programming language BASIC and it's use as a training tool for learning how to program personal computers.

Coding Horror: Everything I Needed to Know About Programming I Learned from BASIC:
Edsger Dijkstra had this to say about Beginner's All Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code:

It is practically impossible to teach good programming style to students that have had prior exposure to BASIC; as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration.

Anyway, in this article I came across some old friends of mine:

Those books bring back some great memories, and some pretty sore wrists as one had to enter the "Computer Games" by hand using the keyboard. There was no Hard Disk Drives back then or even floppy drives. Just cassette tape interfaces to store programs entered for later retrieval.

The article had links to the books that must have been scanned in. Those links are:
BASIC Computer Games
More BASIC Computer Games

Just pop over to the site and check out some of the programs and their listings. Imagine having to enter all those lines of code by hand. There were inevitably typo's that had to be tracked down before saving them off to tape. Imagine how you would feel when you have all but a few lines of code in when a power failure occurred. All that work typing in those lines lost because there was no easy way to save your work like there is now.

Part of me is really glad that those days are gone, but part of me still misses them. A much simpler time. No Windows Vista, no viruses, spyware, adware, etc... No Internet either, modems at 300 baud if you were lucky! More likely 110 baud using the phone handset set into the "acoustic coupler" like the one pictured with this paragraph.

It sure is good to know that times can change, sometimes for the better and sometimes for the worst and sometimes both.

written by Dave M. \\ tags: Apple, BASIC, language, Programming