With a prompt in a recent creative Zoom call to share a magazine from our youth that we still thought about today, I shared a memory of my friends Vince, Mark, and I typing in code for the Commodore VIC-20 from an issue of Computes! Gazette from February 1984. I was 15 at the time and the program was Multicolor Character Generator.
We spent ages reading out the many many lines of machine code while Vince typed it in to the VIC-20. We got it wrong at least once. Sorry Vince!
The program, written by some guy named Bill Gates, was a way of making simple 8-bit symbols that could be used in making games or other software.
It was one of my earliest experiences with making anything visual on a computer.
Here are PDFs of that issue—the ads are incredible! Computes! Gazette issues (and loss of other commodore ephemera) are archived by the commodore.ca website.