[HN Gopher] Show HN: I extracted BASIC listings for Tim Hartnell...
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       Show HN: I extracted BASIC listings for Tim Hartnell's 1986 book
        
       Tim Hartnell was one of the most prolific authors during the early
       days of the home computing boom, writing many popular books
       covering genres of games on different platforms and, in this case,
       artificial intelligence.  I've extracted the BASIC program listings
       from Hartnell's 1986 book 'Exploring Artificial Intelligence on
       Your IBM PC' and organized them along with a PC-BASIC runtime
       environment and instructions so you can try these programs out
       yourself.  Even though the AI landscape has changed enormously
       since Hartnell first wrote this book, I hope one or two of you will
       get some value out of these program listings if you're interested
       in exploring the fundamentals of AI on home-computing platforms as
       they were in the 1980's.  Tim Hartnell unfortunately passed away in
       1991 at the young age of 40, and without his writing I imagine more
       than a few of us would not have found the start in computing we
       did. Thanks Tim.
        
       Author : nzduck
       Score  : 49 points
       Date   : 2025-10-10 09:00 UTC (2 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (github.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
        
       | jhbadger wrote:
       | 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.
        
       | Crinkle wrote:
       | 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.
        
       | firesteelrain wrote:
       | 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.
       | 
       | https://github.com/coding-horror/basic-computer-games
        
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       (page generated 2025-10-12 23:01 UTC)