Loadstar 128 35/q35.d81/t.diskovery 35

Text File | 2022-08-28 | 5KB | 89 lines

                        DISKOVERY: AN HOMAGE TO ART

                              by Fender Tucker


    What is a computer program? For years I thought of a program as a
machine, a way to do calculations without all the hard work. After all,
they mainly did the same thing as a calculator, except you could make them
do it without pressing all those buttons for each calculation. In essence,
a program was a machine that punched the calculator for you.

    When home computers were introduced in the early 80s, there were very
few machines, er, programs, for them. We had to invent our own. And invent
we did, filling magazines with type-in programs designed with one thing in
mind: to push the correct calculator buttons. All that mattered was that
your checkbook program gave you the correct balance, or the typewriter
program (aka word processor) managed your text without error or loss.

    We were happily amazed when the programs would work, and we were
ecstatic when a program worked smoothly and saved us some steps. That was
the Golden Age of Programming. Programmers would labor over algorithms, and
when they got them to work, they'd even try to copyright or patent them.
They'd spend 90% of their time on the hidden "guts" of a program and 10% on
making sure that the menus were logical and actually worked as claimed.

    That was the state of the art (as I saw it) when I came to work at
Softdisk in 1987. I'd pore through Gazette or RUN looking for little
routines that would save me the trouble of inventing them myself. Jim
Weiler and Mike Maynard were years ahead of me -- they'd published dozens
of algorithms on LOADSTAR 64 -- but I've never been one for standing on
giant's shoulders. I usually clip them behind the knees and stomp on their
backs as I stumble past.

    But eventually Jeff Jones and I, with the help of true heroes of the
Commodore like Jon Mattson, Barbara Schulak, Rick Nash and Scott Resh,
built our own set of tools. The LOADSTARs are full of them. THE COMPLEAT
PROGRAMMER gathers many of them into one collection.

    So now we have everything we need to make a program. We just have to
put the minutiae together so that the result is a smooth, working machine.
But what makes them better than the early machines of the 80s?

    Well, since the "guts" have been made relatively easy by the toolboxes
and algorithms, the 90/10 ratio between guts and style has changed. Now we
can spend much more time on the menus (aka the "interface"). We now use
file requestors so the user doesn't have to remember things he has no
business cluttering up his mind with. Programs work from any drive so the
user doesn't have to shuffle disks as much. Everything moves much faster
than it did years ago.

    But it's not only the smoothness of the interface we can now do better;
we can now spend our time on making our machine as pleasing to the eye as
possible. We are beyond inventing -- we are into ART.

    Everything that shows on the screen is under the control of the
programmer because everything is part of the font(s). A program isn't
"finished" until everything that's displayed is exactly as we (the
programmer-artist) wants it. We are in the same position as an artist,
palette in hand, pondering his masterpiece. Is it finished? Not until I add
some cerulean blue.

    It's not only the creation of programs that parallels the work of an
artist. Our programs are digital works of art that will be treated as such
in the future, as long as there are C-64/128 computers to view them on. And
since there are such good C-64-emulators for the PC and Mac, our programs
will exist as long as there are IBM/Mac computers, which show no signs of
dying out.

    Newsweek recently had an article about "collectibles" and mentioned
that old computers are considered quite collectible. In 1997 they are
talking about the early Altairs and others which are mainly boxes with
switches and lights all over them, but who's to say how the C-64 and C-128
will be viewed in 2007, only a decade away? Because there were so many
manufactured, I doubt if the computers themselves will be collectible, but
the works of art created for them just may be. In all false modesty, I
fully expect to be considered by historians of the 21st century as the most
prolificly published 8-bit "artist" there ever was. LOADSTAR, if there's
any justice, will be the Gutenberg Bible of the 8-bit world.

    So I've turned LOADSTAR into an ego trip, but it's a trip you're
invited on, too. Paint a masterpice in BASIC or ML and send it to me and
I'll do my damnedest to make those 21st century art historians sit up and
take notice. I just hope they spell our names right.

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