Computer magazines used to be so much fun. First of all most of them had a very strong focus on programming and they would have articles about how to make electronic hardware to plug into your computer. Very much fun indeed.
Since I was the owner of a Commodore VIC-20 I would buy issues of COMPUTE's Gazette which catered specifically to Commodore 8-bit computers.
I remember one issue which included a machine code monitor listing. The program was in BASIC and it would POKE a machine code monitor (in machine code of course) into memory and then it would start up. I experimented with 6502 assembler using this monitor. I would write the assembly code down and then I would translate it myself to hexadecimal numbers and type them carefully in.
This was one of the great things about the computers of those days. A fifteen year old kid could figure this stuff out by reading magazine articles. There's probably no reason why it can't be made relevant to young people today. Why not make a cool and easy game programming tool for the Nintendo DS for example?
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I agree! I grew up in the 80s and we had an Apple IIGS at my house. The library was full of books with BASIC code, and I used to subscribe to Nibble magazine, which was a magazine dedicated to AppleSoft BASIC. I miss that aspect of computing today. That's why I like your efforts with LibertyBASIC, JustBASIC, and RunBASIC. Keep up the good work and thanks for making computing fun again :)
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