Show HN: I extracted BASIC listings for Tim Hartnell's 1986 book

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47 points by nzduck 3 days ago

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.

firesteelrain - 4 minutes ago

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

Crinkle - 4 hours ago

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.

jhbadger - 5 hours ago

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.