1980s Home Coding: the art of amateur programming

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Melanie Swalwell (2008) Aotearoa Digital Arts: New Media Reader, Stella Brennan and Susan Ballard (eds), Auckland: Clouds.

Writing code oneself was a key part of the reception and culture of early home computers; systems such as the BBC, the Spectrums, the TRS-80, the Atari, Commodore and Amiga ranges, and the Sega SC3000. In the 1980s, home coding was a significant use of these computers, both in terms of the numbers of people who dabbled at coding, and as a mode of engagement with a then new technology. A highly experimental practice, it presaged many of the contemporary practices involved in digital culture, the often-discussed phenomena of appropriation, modification, and remixing. Yet while the ‘advent’ of Web 2.0 has raised the profile of productive consumers, remarkably little attention has been paid to the earlier practices of home coders.

This essay focuses on the experimental basis of home coding in the 1980s, drawing on archival and interview-based research into the New Zealand reception of computers and digital games during this decade. This research into home coding enables us to develop a clearer understanding of the uses that people made of home computers. After the French theorist, Michel de Certeau, I suggest that we know very little about what people actually did with these early items of digital consumer technology. Though some accounts do exist, these tend to be more concerned with either the spectacular (hacking) or the feared potentials of the ‘computer revolution’, such as job losses, thus they provide only partial understandings of early engagements with digital technology. One reason why home coding may have been overlooked is its everydayness, its homeliness, if you like. Even today, those who dabbled at writing software at home – after-school or on the weekend – typically consider that their activities were unremarkable, expressing their sense that ‘everyone was doing it.’ Unfortunately, this popularity does not guarantee that home coding will be remembered; indeed, many of the creations of this era – dubbed ‘hobbyware’ by one of my informants – have already been lost.

I have conducted in-depth interviews with people who were active home coders, and in this essay I blend extracts from the accounts of Katharine Neil, Mark Sibly and Simon Armstrong, Fiona Beals, and John Perry, with material from other informants (including the founding editor of Bits and Bytes magazine and technology journalist, Neill Birss) and archival sources. I focus here on the twin issues of how my informants learnt to code, and what it was that they wrote. In many, if not most, cases, the simple answer to the question of what they wrote was, ‘games.’ I have pursued informants who are knowledgeable about early games, because games were often a key reason why people purchased or otherwise acquired a computer. An important driver not just of the development of early home computers – or ‘micro-computers’, as computers for the home or office user were then called – games also drove the uptake of many early home computer systems, as Neill Birss observed. Though they are often deemed unworthy of serious consideration, digital games are significant in the histories of both home computer use and amateur coding.

As early adopters of digital computers, home coders were effectively inventing uses for home computers. Though a number of magazines advocated the usefulness of programs to help with household budgets, and word processors to compile recipe collections, none of these could be considered the ‘killer app-’ of home computing. Compared to other technologies whose use is clearly part of, or implied by, their function, early computers were a technology in search of a use. On their own, they were essentially useless. Programming was the only use that was indigenous to the computer. As Katharine Neil explains:

…you couldn’t really do much with computers back then unless you learnt a bit of code. You’d do really dumb, primitive things, but… In those days, people bought games and they’d play games, but the coolest thing was to write stuff yourself. In those days, you bought a computer and you bought a book on how to program it, and there was only one way you could do it! And if you didn’t do it, then what was the point of having a computer, because it didn’t do anything, it didn’t do anything for you.

Learning to code
In 1983, Colin Boswell predicted that “computer education would take place in two places—the school and the home.” While computer classes were on offer in some schools (and the debate about computers in schools was heated and long running), and enrolments in formal computer science degrees rapidly escalated during the 1980s, many programmers were self-taught, at least initially.

The computers of the 1980s demanded that users learn to program. Programming might therefore be thought of as a use that was implied. As Mark Sibly and Simon Armstrong explain, in response to my asking how they learnt to code:

Mark: It was much easier in those days, because you turned on a computer and you basically had to program. That was all you could really do. So, the first thing you had to do was command to load a program and then run it.

Simon: And you’ve learned two commands, “load” and “run”, and you go from there.

Mark: And the manual that came with those early computers would have, in the back of it, a hardware diagram. It would have all the highly technical machine code stuff at the back…everything you would possibly need to know about it.

This is in sharp contrast to contemporary computers: effectively ‘black boxed’, most people know very little about what goes on inside them. As Sibly and Armstrong continue:

Mark: Nowadays, if you want to find out something about computers, you can spend a week on the internet and still not find it.

Simon: It would be a bit like, if you have an old car, you can buy one of those books, and you can pretty much take cars to bits and put them back together again with one of those books. But there’s no way you could do that now with new cars. And computers, it is the same, you can [sic] get a book that actually tells you everything, so you can teach yourself.

Like Sibly and Armstrong, my other informants’ learning was also largely informal. Typically, it was a process of trying and testing, trial and error. John Perry described how he came to understand Basic as if he were “learning a new language”. While his family had some books around, which he would occasionally refer to, more often, he recalls,

…you learn a ‘word’—a function, a command—and you use that, and suddenly it changes all your programs, because suddenly you’ve got something that you can do. And then you learn some other trick. And generally I’d see someone use it in a program or something, and I’d look it up in a book sometimes, but mostly there was [no need for a book]. Mostly to start with you’d just copy the program and change a few little things to work out what was going on.”

Fiona Beals received her ZX Spectrum from an elderly couple whom her mother knew. They had decided it wasn’t much use to them. The instruction book that came with it wasn’t helpful, telling only how to setup the computer to type a letter. Beals found the Usborne range of books more useful, and, using these, she taught herself to program. To start with, she would type in other peoples’ game programs. Then,

Once I clicked onto what was happening with the book, I was able to go ‘well actually I don’t want it to do this’, I want it to do that. I could start manipulating the code to do other stuff…

Like Perry, hers was a process of learning by doing: “When I was writing the code myself, I would always write 5 or 6 lines of code and then end it, and test it, run it and see how it would go.”

Beals grew up in Westport, an isolated region of New Zealand, with little contact with others who were programming. As such, she recalls not knowing that what she was writing was a computer language:

I didn’t know that until I learnt Basic in high school, and I was like ‘Hey, I know all of this, I know this idea’. I didn’t know all those things were actually a computer language. I had just thought ‘oh, you have to give the computer instructions’, and I actually clicked onto as a kid that the instructions were like a flow chart – that you could send it back and forth and stuff like that.

Magazines were another useful resource for the budding programmer. Typically, magazines of the period contained source code, as Katharine Neil explains:

You know how you buy games magazines now and they have CDs or DVDs on the cover, in plastic attached to the cover? In those days they had the source code, they printed the source code [in the magazine], in Basic. And you’d type it in. So they’d have a couple of pages of the code for a game, a sample, simple little game.

In New Zealand, the locally published Sega Computer, Bits and Bytes, and Computer Input (known simply as Input to those ‘in the know’) were important for staying in touch with other coders. The contributions of readers/users to these magazines were many: subscribers sent in their programs, high scores, and the contact details of user groups in their area. As the editor of Sega Computer wrote encouragingly:

It is important to note that this is YOUR magazine. So please send in any programs that you have, be them [sic] small or large, complex or simple…it matters not. If someone sends in a program and someone else learns from it then it has been worth it! To be quite frank I could name ten people in the UK, and three in New Zealand who now make a lot of money through writing programs, and they all started by writing a few simple programs and having them published in computer magazines! SO GET WRITING!

Magazines were also the place where the achievements of fellow programmers were celebrated, such as the 1984 publication by Grandstand of the 13 year old John Perry’s game, “City Lander.” And Sega Computer provided the enterprising Allan Rodgers of Gore – then 17 – with a contact for Grandstand’s in-house programmer, Michael Howard, to whom he wrote for advice on a career in programming.

Some schools allowed pupils to take school computers home on weekends and over holiday periods, or to frequent the computer room at lunchtime, and these provided important opportunities to master coding techniques. Yet few of my informants credit formal school computer classes with igniting their interest in programming. Some gleaned knowledge from local users’ groups, of which New Zealand had a considerable number. For their part, Sibly and Armstrong found these meetings too much “like church” and only attended a couple of meetings, preferring to spend time “at home or at friends’ houses, learning how to program and making little games, experimenting with them.”

Finally, computer camps, such as the ones planned by Peter R. Carr and Barry C. Small for the summer school holidays one year, offered another source of information and learning about computers. This series of camps aimed:

to make the children aware of computers, the power and versatility of computers and the effect of modern technology on society now and in the future…teaching them to use standard application programmes and packages, teaching robotics, and voice synthesis methods and electronic and servicing techniques through building a simple computer. Other topics including vocational guidance, future developments, effect on society, covered by use of visiting lecturers and video training films.
Whether the attendees learnt to code or not isn’t clear from the brochure. But like some user groups, one wonders how much fun the kids would have found some of the activities (were schoolkids of the 1980s interested in the societal effects of computers?).

Users as makers
The use of home computers, as the above accounts indicate, was fundamentally experimental. And this home use is one of the first moments when experimentation with digital technology is widespread. Home coders represent a classic case of use and consumption as a form of active production. In The Practice of Everyday Life, de Certeau makes a distinction between production and the uses that are made of products, by users who are not producers. His work is useful for understanding the active form of consumption that is experimentation: the verb ‘faire’ in de Certeau’s French title Arts de Faire, communicates more effectively the sense of an active making (in French, faire means to make or to do) than does the English term ‘use’, which tends to imply functionality, instrumentality.
Writing games at home was undoubtedly one of the most common uses that were made of early home computers. Fiona Beals describes one of the programs she wrote:

The one program I do remember, which was totally fresh, was that I generated a pyramid on the screen that was firing bullets, simulated style, probably numbers and letters (I used to use x’s to generate the picture). So I had this pyramid of x’s, bullets that were x’s, and aeroplanes that were flying across, and it was all random. When the bullet hit the aeroplane, the aeroplane would explode, But it was done in a randomised way, so that you never knew where it was going to hit. I remember that I left it on because it was such a great thing, and my computer overheated.

Katharine Neil’s home coding labours produced a Tic-tac-toe game. Neil recalls:

I didn’t know anything about graphics, so I wrote a Tic-tac-toe game in ASCII, because I didn’t know… no, I knew how to draw lines. I drew lines and I used ASCII characters. I thought it was very, very clever, because I thought my computer AI was very, very clever, because the computer would always draw or win. It was impossible for my computer to lose. And I thought that was very clever for a few years, until I realised that everyone knew that!

The majority of home coders were amateurs, whose coding remained a hobby. Indeed, all of my informants were still at secondary school during the 1980s (subsequently, a number would have careers in various aspects of software development). There were, however, opportunities for home coders to turn some type of advantage from their programs. As already mentioned, magazines talked up the possibility of hobbyists turning professional, and the advertisement placed by Dick Smith Electronics in the December/January 1983-84 issue of Bits and Bytes – advocating “enterprising computer buffs” to profit from their hobby by writing programs for the new Dick Smith Colour Computer – illustrates this interest in the programs of home coders. Some coders, such as the young Mark Sibly, were thus able to turn some advantage from their hobbyist involvement, albeit in a small way. Sibly “sold” his Vic-20 game, “Dinky Kong”, to an Auckland computer store owner, who later commercialised it in the U.S. His return from the transaction was an external floppy drive, enabling him to save his programs to removable storage media.

There is, however, a degree of instability or slippage around this apparent hobbyist mercantilism. I have heard a number of stories from people who aspired to sell their games, and were not able to. For instance, after having the code for his game “Harbour” published in Computer Input and selling “City Lander” to Grandstand for $300.00 in the same year, John Perry wrote another game which he also showed the company. Grandstand, however, were not interested, as they already had a title in “Dungeons Beneath Cairo” that was similar to the one he was offering. “Dungeons Beneath Cairo” was considered superior because it was written in machine code rather than Basic. Others, like Andrew Kerr, who intended trying to have his untitled machine coded game endorsed by Poseidon software, never got around to it (“but it did get me an “A” in Computers at college!”). In part, too, the energy and experimentalism of home coding ensured it would remain on the margins of ‘legitimate’ production. Despite the importance of games in driving the uptake of early computers, “serious” software people (those who wrote software for mainframes, accounting purposes, etc) adopted a kind of “snobbery” towards the user end of the market: fearing the association with games would diminish their credibility, Neill Birss recalls, they wouldn’t advertise in Bits and Bytes. Whilst productive, then, in most cases home coding remained a practice that “produce[d] without capitalizing.”

A computer in the 1980s was, as Katharine Neil puts it, “an expensive toy”:

[People] use computers for work now. You didn’t used to use computers for work. People with home PCs use them for writing their CVs, and doing work-y things like using them as a communication portal and all that. Whereas computers in the 80s, when I was a kid, a computer was a luxury item for having fun…it wasn’t something that you had in your house because you needed a computer, like you need a mobile phone or something, and you do a bit of work on it as well. It was definitely a fun toy…far more of a toy than it is now. Today, people are like ‘Oh, I spend so much time in front of a computer, I go home and I don’t want to spend any more time’. Whereas back then, it was like some cool novelty – it was like a Ferrari or something. It was like a Sunday drive: it was a luxury car that you drove around in on a Sunday, not a commuter vehicle that you sit in traffic jams every day in.

Home coders involvement with the computer as a “fun toy” laid the ground for an everyday, creative engagement with computers: a messing around with computers, a seeing what was possible. Theirs was a curiosity driven experimentation, in the tradition of making crystal set radios and hotting up cars, according to Neill Birss. Reflecting on teenagers’ ready embrace of the challenge of coding, Birss ponders whether or not there was a peculiarly New Zealand dimension to this:

I think perhaps when you’re very remote you don’t have the sense that hey, this is a big thing. Maybe if you grew up in Silicon Valley and you thought about writing something you’d see all these huge guys and you might be a bit more daunted in some ways.

While New Zealand’s remoteness is sometimes a popular “cultural narrative” for the creativity of its inhabitants, I am more interested in thinking through what home coders did and what the significance is of their activity (rather than why they did what they did). Home coders’ ways of using the computer are particularly compelling. In the 1980s, programming seemed to involve an element of play, whether users were writing games or something else. This playful approach is distinct from the common instrumental relation to technology – so well diagnosed by Martin Heidegger – where the computer is viewed (predominantly) as productivity tool. The persuasiveness of Heidegger’s critique of the instrumental conception of technology, and the status of his essay, “The Question Concerning Technology,” as one of the seminal texts in the field, however, also acts as a limit, in that it contributes to the naturalisation of instrumentality; thinking and theorising other relations to technology, beyond the instrumental, becomes difficult. Home coders’ provide a contrary example. Their use of early computers was not instrumental: it could not be, as they often did not know what they were doing. Effectively making it up as they went along, home coders invented a new relation with the computer. By their own accounts, it didn’t seem all that remarkable at the time, partly because such use was widespread and partly because relations with home computers had not settled into any one particular pattern.

Some contemporary digital makers – artists and others – embody an approach to computers that is reminiscent of home coding, an ethic of experimentation, in the sense that home coders’ trying and testing, their probing of possibilities, provided a base for invention. Having little regard for orthodoxy, such an ethic is both pragmatic, and displays a certain daring in following a line of thought to see where it leads and what might happen. The result might not be what was expected and is often unlikely. As with home coders, what such acts of poiesis do is to bring forth other possibilities, new relations to technology, other modes of revealing.

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