Category Archives: Computers

Relating to computers and technology

The Optimus Keyboard

I totally freakin’ want one of these. It’s a keyboard, where every key is also a miniature, programmable screen. You can instantaneously alter the keys to show Latin or Cyrillic characters, or whatever else you want—even animations!

Learning C through BASIC?

While trying to think of ways to make learning the C programming language a less frustrating experience, I was struck recently with the idea of writing a complete tutorial on C entirely from the viewpoint of writing games. I’d be teaching pure ISO standard C, so that means I’d have to stick with text-based games. Still, doable.

Anyway, thinking about this made me remember a set of C books (BASIC Computer Games and More BASIC Computer Games) that I used to check out all the time from the Sacramento Belle Cooledge Library when I was a kid (it was at a completely different location back then, FWIW). These were books filled with nothing but listings of BASIC source code for hundreds of text-based games.

So I did a quick search for these books, to see if I could still find them somewhere, and lo, to my surprise, their complete contents can be found at AtariArchives.org!

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