Software Archaeology at the Clapp

My wife, young son and I are ardent book lovers, and since we discovered it three year ago we have paid an annual visit to what has become one of our favorite events – the Friends of Clapp Memorial Library Book Sale in Belchertown. With 25,000 items, most priced at a dollar or less, the Clapp sale sometimes resembles the bibliophile’s answer to Filene’s Basement.

Last Saturday we spent nearly half a day scanning the shelves at the Clapp for bargains, and were not disappointed. I was pleased to pick up a copy of Mark Twain’s Roughing It to augment my adventure book collection, and found a nice copy of Dinosaur Time, illustrated by Arnold Lobel of Frog and Toad fame, to read to my two-year-old.

The day’s most intriguing discovery, however, came when I wandered into the deepest recesses of the library basement, and stumbled upon … the computer books.

Computer books do not age gracefully. As I thumbed through a 1989 edition of Using Paradox 3.0, I recalled how Borland’s once-mighty database system had faded into obscurity, rendering fat reference guides like the one I was holding, so many pages of scrap. Voodoo Windows (Ventana Press, 1992) offered tips and tricks of the day, such as how to manage a Windows 3.1 PIF file. Several generations later, Windows Vista users can claim much more sophisticated and frustrating problems to grapple with.

The oldest title I came across had a bit of character, and at a price of 50 cents I decided to scoff it up. 51 Game Programs for the Timex Sinclair 1000 and 1500 dates back to 1983, and was written by prolific Australian author, Tim Hartnell. Before he died at age 40, Hartnell penned books covering most of the prehistoric PC platforms of the early eighties such as the Commodore Vic-20, Apple IIe, and the IBM PC-junior. But the Timex Sinclair 1000 was the real cat’s pajamas. At $99.95 retail, it shattered the home computer price barrier. Never mind that the T/S1000's video display was limited to 32 by 22 characters in black & white on a TV screen, and the device’s long-term storage solution was a finicky interface to a standard cassette tape recorder. It sported a whopping 2K of memory which could store programs written to its built-in BASIC language interpreter.

10 REM *** POETRY ***
15 SCROLL
17 IF RND>.7 THEN GOTO 40
20 FOR J=1 TO RND*3
25 SCROLL
30 NEXT J
40 LET A$=" "
50 GOSUB 100+10*INT (RND*12)
51 LET X=LEN A$
52 LET Y=LEN B$
53 IF A$(X-1)=B$(Y-1) THEN GOTO 50
60 IF X+Y>=32 THEN GOTO 90
80 LET A$=A$+B$
85 GOTO 50
90 PRINT A$
95 RUN
100 LET B$="DETACHED "
105 RETURN
110 LET B$="INITIATE "
115 RETURN
120 LET B$="EARLY "
125 RETURN
130 LET B$="ALTHOUGH "
135 RETURN
140 LET B$="... "
145 RETURN
150 LET B$="DISCIPLE "
155 RETURN
160 LET B$="WEEPING "
165 RETURN
170 LET B$="ONLY "
175 RETURN
180 LET B$="REACHED OUT FOR "
185 RETURN
190 LET B$="LONELY "
195 RETURN
200 LET B$="YEARNS FOR "
205 RETURN
210 LET B$="THEN "
215 RETURN

51 Game Programs for the Timex Sinclair 1000 and 1500 includes Basic program listings for amusements such as Balloon Buster, Etchasketch and Hangman. I was excited to find that Canadian Jeff Vavasour has created a web-based T/S1000 emulator where the programs in the book can actually be entered and run. I tried my hand at a program called Poetry which the book claims will “turn your T/S1000 into a Walt Whitman…almost.” See the source listing and a screen print of the program’s output below. Not exactly Leaves of Grass material, but for 40 lines of code and 25-year-old technology, wha d’ya want?