My friend Damien was blogging about his early experiences with computers & programming yesterday, and it reminded me of how I got started. Specifically, it reminded me of an influential magazine I read at the time called “Input”, which taught BASIC programming for the ZX Spectrum and BBC. It was a short-lived, esoteric British thing, but I was astonished to find that not only does Wikipedia have a page on it, but they also linked a TV advert of it which has been lovingly archived on YouTube:
This brought back some serious memories. I remember that as well as the demo snippets there was an adventure game of sorts which was being published bit by bit in the magazine, as an incentive for you to buy them all. Like most magazines of this type there were regular typos that you’d scratch your head over, but in a way that was a good thing since it taught you to debug other people’s code.
I was 10/11 years old when this magazine came out, and I can probably trace my programming beginnings directly to it. It’s probably a bizarre concept to the younger generation, now that they have instant access to almost limitless information on the Internet. What I would have given to have the Internet back then when I was learning, instead of scratching around for information in magazines like this. 
December 31st, 2009 at 7:56 pm
What’s funny is the graphics and the voiceover are both pretty acceptable today- the graphics in a sort of retro way, but high quality nonetheless. Can;t be said for many 80s commercials
January 2nd, 2010 at 11:26 am
Yeah, I thought that too!
March 9th, 2010 at 3:40 am
Oh I initially grew up on the old Commodore Vic20, the first one they put out. It had a weak unsafe version of BASIC on it (you could even POKE memory locations in it), and I had an assembly programming cartridge that has 16kb of extra memory on it along with a text editor and tape cassette recorder for saving off my programs. Only manual I had with the 300 or so page manual it came with that described all the opcodes (little more then a reference manual), but that was the start of my programming experience. I love that thing, I still have it too, and it still works to boot!