One of the advantages of lockdown is that spare time is often in plentiful supply. I noted a few months ago that BBC Basic for Z80 by R.T.Russell is now open source, and available under a zlib license. Inspired by the work of David Given who has included it to his CPMish project, I decided to have a crack at porting it to my BSX Breadboard Computer. I had to fettle the source files slightly …
I wrote a few months back about resources for kids who want to get into programming and mentioned a resource called YOUSRC. I tweet the man behind the curtain, Paul Clarke (@YOUSRC) on a fairly regular basis and after a conversation about Bresenham’s Incremental Line Algorithm (a fast way to plot any line without using floating point arithmetic) in response to a game he’d written on the site (Missile Command), I thought I’d have a …
I was talking to my kids the other day about computers and I had a sad insight into how schools approach to IT has changed over the last 30 years. Back in the day, you were encouraged at an early age to program computers by your teachers and your peers. Heck, the computers even encouraged it; most computers of the day booted into a programming language (usually BASIC). I realised that I came from an …
