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.
jhbadger | 3 days ago
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.
firesteelrain | 3 days ago
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.