mdf
5 hours ago
I remember, as a child, attempting to reproduce the BASIC program in one of the MAD magazine issues. Somewhere, I had made a typo, which completely screwed the output. I guessed that the tediousness of the whole exercise was part of the joke, shrugged, and moved on.
Luckily, someone else succeeded: https://meatfighter.com/mad/
arp242
4 hours ago
It was pretty common to distribute code as "listing" like this. Typically it came with a checksum for every line and a small program to compute and print that for your own program that you had typed over, which you could then use to fairly quickly(-ish) spot any typos.
All of this is how I learned to program by the way. Kids these days don't know how easy they have it.
mellavora
4 hours ago
Checksums! Bah, I used to have to code uphill both ways in the snow, and I liked it!
Mountain_Skies
3 hours ago
Checksums were a great idea but I just could never resist the temptation to make changes to the program as I was typing it in.
evanelias
2 hours ago
Excellent link, thank you for posting this.
In case there are any other Sergio Aragones superfan weirdos like me here, who only click MAD-related stories in order to command-f for "Sergio Aragones" and then move on when inevitably there are no results: today's your lucky day, click that link above!
derencius
an hour ago
nice. I'm a Groo fan.
dole
3 hours ago
The Commodore version of the source in the magazine never worked. I probably typed it in at least five times in whole thinking I'd screwed something up. It wasn't until a few years ago (from an HN post, no less) that I found the link above and finally, finally got to see what the code did.
m463
4 hours ago
dedication to create an svg version...