>  You seem to assume that I'm some 15yo whose first computer was a PS2.

More a like very bright 20-ish. ;-) How should I have known you were about 
my age?

>  And exactly what do you think I consider a game? Why wouldn't a VIC-20
> or an Atari 2600 game be a game? Primitive (even by the time they still
> were popular)? Definitely. Playable games? Why not?

Because I assumed you to be in your twenties. Sorry. But do you really think 
a teen or a young twen would consider our first computer-games fun? A game 
like emperor or pharaoh? Enter number of acres to be planted, enter grain to 
be spend on subjects, x subjects died, y subjects were born - you know the 
kind of game? When we were young this kind of stuff was fun - at least for 
me. Or the original "Bard's tale" on the C64? Mangar attacks. Hero got 
blasted for 56 points of damage? I was enticed with the partially animated 
graphics - the Zombies were really gross. And the 3D labyrinths, the 
pictures of the streets of Skara Brae, all new and exciting. But would a 
teen today say that this is an interesting game?

Later I really liked nethack. But a game that uses a yellow "i" for an imp 
is not what any person less than 25 years old would consider a fun game.

>  I really don't understand what binary coded decimals have to do with
> space optimizations (given that they actually *waste* space compared to
> native binary representation of numbers).

And you are right: nothing at all.  I was just strolling down memory lane. I 
had some problem to solve with BCD back then. And trying to solve it I 
stumbled upon the word "nibble" for a half-byte. Something younger people 
will probably have never heard of, neither will they need to hear about 
this. And thinking you to be much younger...

>  I still don't buy a *sine wave* taking *10 minutes* to draw, even if you
> used BASIC.

I think the sine-function was not the problem. The drawing of the pixels 
was. Maybe my method of determining which bits were set was the culprit, I 
don't remember. Maybe PEEK and POKE did take extra time. I think you had no 
bit-operators in Commodore Basic (or I did not know it had - I think the 
"and / or" was only logical operators), so I may have used some math and 
some loops that were not optimal. Again, I don't remember the details, 
except that it took a lot of time to draw this curve. It was my first 
computer, the manuals were written in English (a foreign language for me), 
my first programming language and my first program that did draw a graph.

Besides, to get a smooth curve you had to compute more than one pixel per 
column. Knowing my younger self I assume I'll have iterated from 0 - 360 
degrees and converted this to radians. Which probably took some GOSUBs, as 
did the encoding and decoding of the individual bits.

>  At least you didn't type gigantic hex listings, like me...

A lot was done by entering DATA - byte values which were read and then poked 
into memory for small graphics or machine language code. It was pretty much 
the same, only in decimal. I remember the PC magazines had checksums at the 
end of each line so correcting was possible if you entered the 
checksum-generator first.

My first steps into 6502 assembler were done entirely by hand since I could 
not afford a proper assembler-program. Got a book on assembler, did 
translate the code into machine-language by hand. So I know of the joys of 
entering hex values - assembler is something else I do not miss at all. ;-) 
Make a mistake and the computer did freeze - then guess what went wrong for 
want of a debugger.

>> Later, on the C64, a way better and faster computer, when you were doing 
>> a
>> flood-fill with Simon's BASIC you could sit by and watch the picture to
>> complete.
>
>  That would tell something about the speed of the BASIC interpreter rather

Yes. And that is part of the point. The very first post did compare BASIC to 
Python and from there did compare computer speeds by the example of 
interpreted languages.

>  These are some pictures I drew with my first computer, a Spectrum 128:
> http://warp.povusers.org/SpectrumPics/

Nice. Especially the Ninja Turtles. Fond memories here, too ;-)

The Spectrum seems to have had way better graphics than the VIC. As I 
already mentioned: you could not colour individual pixels, only individual 
characters.

>  Please stop assuming I'm a 15yo.

Sorry about this. ;-)

To put an end to a lengthy discussion: I told what I remember. I might 
remember wrong, though I doubt it. I have no way to prove I remember the 
correct time.

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