I read a BASIC programming book when I was around 10, and the ELIZA example was hilarious and fascinating to me. I implemented several Eliza versions in secondary school as a way to learn new programming languages, and went on to study Computational Linguistics in university. Occasionally I tried to find the book and particular Eliza example but failed, and I doubt I have the book now.
When I saw the name Tim Hartnell, I knew it was him. I found the example on page 216 of Tim Hartnell's Giant Book of Computer Games.
I remember his books -- I had his one on adventure games. I always liked this sort of book by people like Hartnell and David Ahl that would have these long BASIC listings with lots of GOTOs and GOSUBs.
It was Tim Harnell's book Creating Adventure Games On Your Computer that rekindled my interest in him as an author. Brings back fun memories of slogging through program listings in front of my ZX Spectrum and C64 :)
There were so many books back in the day that you could get at the library in the kids section and type them into your computer. I rarely got them to work!
Jeff Atwood has preserved a lot too and people have converted the basic games into multiple languages over the last few years.
Thank you so much for triggering this memory.
I read a BASIC programming book when I was around 10, and the ELIZA example was hilarious and fascinating to me. I implemented several Eliza versions in secondary school as a way to learn new programming languages, and went on to study Computational Linguistics in university. Occasionally I tried to find the book and particular Eliza example but failed, and I doubt I have the book now.
When I saw the name Tim Hartnell, I knew it was him. I found the example on page 216 of Tim Hartnell's Giant Book of Computer Games.
He was an amazing author back in the day. Thank you for the message :)
I remember his books -- I had his one on adventure games. I always liked this sort of book by people like Hartnell and David Ahl that would have these long BASIC listings with lots of GOTOs and GOSUBs.
It was Tim Harnell's book Creating Adventure Games On Your Computer that rekindled my interest in him as an author. Brings back fun memories of slogging through program listings in front of my ZX Spectrum and C64 :)
There were so many books back in the day that you could get at the library in the kids section and type them into your computer. I rarely got them to work!
Jeff Atwood has preserved a lot too and people have converted the basic games into multiple languages over the last few years.
https://github.com/coding-horror/basic-computer-games
That's an amazing resource - thanks for sharing!