I miss the days of entering pre-made programs from Compute! and Games magazines, and finally getting to see them work. After all the entering was done, I'd usually have to go back and find any typos or missed lines to get the code to run properly. Sometimes there were actual misprints in the magazines, and a correction might show up in next month's edition, or I'd figure it out on my own. It was a great way to learn and figure things out, and end up with something to play. Of course, that was back when the magazine were something like $1.50, or even up to $2.00, and they contained loads of material each month. Now computer magazines are five to eight times those prices, with no programs, much fewer articles, much thinner, and nearly all ads.

I personally had a CoCo II, an Apple IIe, an Atari 800 XL, an Atari 1200, a SpectraVideo 328 (Z-80), and a MindSet (80186) system. I never actually owned a Commodore though. As I went from system to system, I always had to convert whatever I wrote or typed in from a magazine, into the next system. They were always different enough from the previous system that translating was always needed. The text columns could be 32, 40, 64 or 80. The resolutions were often different. The actual graphics and sound commands were often slightly different. POKE and PEEK addresses were never the same on different maker's systems, etc. But, I almost always found ways to adapt old code to new systems.

I also had a subscription to Compute! and a Commodore-specific magazine called Ahoy! Typing in those machine-language programs could take some time. As I recall, Compute! provided an input program that calculated a checksum for each line of code entered which allowed you to catch errors more easily. It was way more fun writing my own code like this game. I got pretty good at Motorola 6502 assembly language.

I'm impressed with all your hardware and your ability to translate software from one machine to the other. Cheers.

In all my life,I never owned more than two systems at a time. Older systems typically failed, forcing me to move to something else. Sometimes I just needed a better system, and the one that was oldest would end up retired. Of course, I always tried to migrate all my stuff to the newer systems each time - with varying degrees of success. I got pretty good at Z-80 assembly and started to work with 8088/8086 assembly. Then the faster chips with segmented memory and protected modes came along, and I never kept up.

Then collection CD-ROMS started to appear with 10,000 shareware titles on them, and writing my own stuff was no longer the fun niche it used to be. It got to the point that no matter what I wrote, someone else already did nearly the same thing too.

Now, the only time I program is just to keep a few old utilities I wrote working as things slowly change. I made a utility to read through jpeg files, stripping out any non-image blocks, it used to read directly from the disk FAT area to locate file, which was faster. NTFS came along and totally broke it. I ultimately fixed it to work again, but lost a few functions that just weren't worth the effort to fix. The need is no longer there, because there's now dozens of programs out there that can serve a similar function. Then the internet came along, so I use a lot more than I program now!

I've still got a G4 "Luxor Lamp" style iMac set up in my family room. I rarely boot it. There's a G5 in my closet that I drag out on occasion to run some software that refuses to run on my Intel iMac. The Intel is partitioned so that I can still run some applications under the Snow Leopard version of the OS.

I thought I might try my hand at writing iOS applications. But after coding all day at work, I just don't feel like it when I get home. It's not as much
fun as it was when I wrote those Commodore applications.

Coding is fun, but it can be time consuming and tiring at the same time. If there weren't other things to do that I enjoy, I'd likely still be coding. If you know of a way to add a few extra hours to each day, while remaining in sync with the rest of the world....