[arp242]

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.

[pimlottc]

Huh, we used to type in BASIC programs from magazines back in the 1980s and I don’t ever recall seeing any kinds of checksum. We would often resort to printing out the code and visually comparing line by line against the magazine.

[arp242]

The first edition of MSX Computer Magazine from 1985 has them, and I doubt they were the first or invented it: https://www.msxcomputermagazine.nl/archief/bladen/msx_comput...

Perhaps it was less common in other countries? Things were a lot less global back then and things operated more on a local level.

[pimlottc]

We mostly had Family Computing magazine. I looked up an issue from 1985 with one of my favorite type-by-hand games, Hit or Miss [0], and no sight of a helpful checksum.

To be honest, the idea of it would have blown my mind back then; the idea that your BASIC code is just a text file that can be processed by other programs is something that would never have occurred to me.

https://archive.org/details/FamilyComputingIssue041983Dec/Fa...

[kenjackson]

Checksums became popular at some point in the 80s. I remember when COMPUTE! first added them they were a godsend. Especially for the machine language programs that were just pages of data statements.

[mrandish]

In the early 80s I never saw checksums on code listings but by the mid-80s it was fairly common, although certainly not universal.

[mellavora]

Checksums! Bah, I used to have to code uphill both ways in the snow, and I liked it!

[Mountain_Skies]

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.

[tyre]

> Kids these days don't know how easy they have it.

Maybe it’s rose-colored glasses, but I have much fonder memories of programming basic on a Ti-84 calculator than debugging an import incompatibility between. Es5 and CommonJS modules

[latexr]

I would take typing a program by hand from printed paper over dealing with npm, any day.

Thankfully I have to do neither.