Halfway through typing this post for the first time, Patreon's web page just inexplicably disappeared, losing everything I had written. I will now attempt to recall what I just wrote!
Anyway.
Ten new magazines arrived today — ten issues of Monitor magazine, the official publication of the unofficial nationwide Atari users' club. I had it in my head that Monitor was an Atari publication for some reason, so I was interested to discover that its origins were similar to Page 6. As far as I'm aware, Monitor never hit the newsstands, though, while Page 6 quickly outgrew being a "club magazine" within a matter of issues.
In terms of what's in the issues, it's the usual mix of stuff for the period: short games of reviews that don't really tell you all that much, reviews of "serious" software that are a bit more comprehensive, plus programming tips and tricks — many of which look like black magic to a modern audience.
Looking back on that latter aspect of things in particular always impresses me, because it was actually reasonably widespread knowledge at the time. You had to know that stuff, because there were no real "shortcuts" to achieving those tasks as there are today. Even something as simple as changing the font of the on-screen text involved redefining data in the computer's memory a byte at a time rather than just clicking "change font".
Whenever I look back on this stuff, I find myself wondering if anyone knows how to program modern computers in that way — or indeed if it's even possible to access the guts of a modern computer in the same way. I suspect not; the reason a lot of programming in the 8-bit era in particular worked the way it did was because the hardware was standardised within a platform — one 800XL was the same as any other (perhaps with some minor differences in revisions over time) and so it was possible to do thing like establish a "memory map" of which bits of the computer's memory did what.
Sure, today's machines are a whole lot easier to use, and the Internet allows us to do pretty much anything we'd care to think of with our computers. But I also sort of miss that feeling of directly interacting with a machine in that way — even if it's just through a bit of tentative POKE action in BASIC. I still remember that if you poke 1 into location 752, you hide the cursor; the number you poke into location 82 defines where the left margin on the screen is; and if you poke 0 into location 559, you turn the screen display off. That's about it!
Perhaps I'll learn something from all these old mags yet.
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