Comment by zephjc | Hacker News Reader

Comment by zephjc | Hacker News Reader

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Funny, my first was similar, in Apple ][ BASIC. When I was in 7th grade, a friend (still to this day) and I had a typing class which used Apple ][s. One day we had a substitute teacher in who knew absolutely nothing about computers. I decided it would be funny to prank her so I wrote something like:

    10 PRINT "GOVERNMENT ACCESS ONLY: THE FBI HAS BEEN CONTACTED"
    20 FLASH
    30 GOTO 10

I called her over with a worried face and said "I don't know what happened!" I could see her heart skip a beat as her eyes bugged out.

We quickly started snickering and admitted it was just a joke. She laughed it off and was a good sport about it.

Oh yes. 7th grade lines on the Apple IIe:

  10 FOR I = 1 to 100
  20 PRINT "I WILL NOT SPEAK OUT OF TURN IN CLASS. I WILL FOLLOW CLASS RULES"
  30 NEXT I

"That is fantastic that you can type all of that out on your typewrite Michael. Well done." (The concept of Dot Matrix wasn't even well known initially and perhaps bad lenses).

The advanced Apple ][ trick was to make the line 13 characters long and add the concatenation ; at the end:

  10 PRINT "I AM COOL!   ";
  20 GOTO 10

On a 40-character text display, amazing things happen...

Same here - I was influenced in my first BASIC program by the Wargames movie and "Firefox" (Clint Eastwood, not Mozilla) and had a password protected diagram of an ascii uber figher jet.

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