[vain]

I spent an entire night typing this into my Commodore 64. And it didn't work. I also messed up the save to tape, and never had the patience to type it all over again.

Real world software programming was hard, and it still is. It remains just as frustrating when it doesn't work.

[mrspeaker]

I was sad when this edition of MAD came out, because I owned a Spectravideo 318 (based on a Z80 chip) that didn't have a listing. That wasn't a surprise though - my parents must have got it super cheap thinking "it's just as good as that C64 he keeps asking for". It turns out it was "popular" in Japan, but no one I knew even owned one, let alone had any games to share!

However, I also noticed that in MAD for many months afterwards there was always at least one "letter from readers" suggesting typos and bugfixes to try and get it to work.

I remember thinking that maybe I dodged a bullet!

[tclancy]

I had a similar experience with a boxing game whose graphics rivaled anything I'd bought (or, more realistically, Fast Hack'em'd from a friend). I spent a minute or so trying to find my typo in 500 lines of random characters before giving that up as a hopelessly stupid task.

I've always wondered if I became a coder because of or in spite of that experience.

[RickJWagner]

Great story! I remember typing in a few 'magazine programs' also, on my Vic-20.

[mysterydip]

The most frustrating part for me with those magazine programs was the number of them written for a computer other than mine. I drooled over all the cool C64 game programs, then went over to my section and typed in some ascii maze or text adventure.

[mml]

every summer for about 3 years, i tried to key this into my apple IIe. Came up with all sorts of schemes to keep track of my place in the listing, but never got it to display more than a few lines of the illustration, which I declared a minor victory (the first 2 times, it didn't work at all!).

This experience ingrained my top row typing skills in a big way though...

[dole]

I think I typed this twice into my C64 and never got it working either. Always wondered what the output looked like.