Flash Back to 1981 💾 Choppergirl's Signature Store Display HELLO WORLD Program

My Antique Computer Playlist: • Paranormal 🖥 aiPiDP-11/70 💀🌼🌵 Dia De Los M...
This was my quick one line version of Hello World I would leave running on store display 8-bit computers back in 1981... mainly at Radio Shack on a TRS-80 Model III, or Macy's on well any of their Commodore, Atari, or TI-99/4A computers. It was super fast quick to bang out on keyboard and then jet continuing walking the mall...

I installed an emulator locally just now to show a friend real quick online. Back in the day at first it the print statements were two words... like Hello & World, Radio & Shack, Shop & Macy's, or chopper & girl, but I got more tasteful as time went on and just substituted non-controversial astericks.

What you see is me doing this in VICE (C128) today real quick to do it for the first time in 80 column mode in 50 years but... BUT! all the GRAPHICS 5 command or F9 & X key combo would do was hang the C128 Emulator on my Windows 10 machine.

So F! it, you get it in 40 column mode.

You can of course tweak the numbers and text of course hack up the program to suit and screen size or sign pattern or thing you want to say.... you get the idea...

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VICE - the Versatile Commodore Emulator: https://vice-emu.sourceforge.io/

Here you go, if you want to copy, mod, and paste my little Hello World one line attractor into VICE or elsewhere:

5 x=x+.13:y=y+0.2:print tab(int(sin(x)*19)+20)"*":print tab(int(cos(y)*19)+20)"*":goto 5

or, broken down for readability and clarity, Hello World for a 40 column C=64 screen

5 x=x+.13:y=y+0.2
10 print tab(int(sin(x)*17)+18)"hello"
15 print tab(int(cos(y)*17)+18)"world"
20 goto 5

Well, I finally figured out by accident how to get the VICE C128 Emulator in 80 column mode...
You have to execute the GRAPHICS 5 command (& press enter), then do RESET from the File pulldown menu. Bloody hell. Too late now.

For a 22 column VIC 20, you'll want to of course tweak down the tab numbers:

5 x=x+.133:y=y+0.171
10 print tab(int(sin(x)*8)+9)"amiga"
15 print tab(int(cos(y)*8)+9)"ahead"
20 goto 5

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I write a lot of programs back in the day that filled up the C64 memory and wrote quite a few machine language programs with TinyMon

Macy's in our local Mall was the hot location to play on, test, and get all the free access to computer time you wanted, believe it or not. The retail sales people never once said a thing to me :-) I was courtesy back and paid them back by jumping off any computer anyone else wanted to see and freely hawking and discussing the merits of models with potential customers... :-) There was no computer sales person dedicated for the computers on display ever. Computers were still considered curios or toys for super nerds back then.

I bought a VIC-20 from a Rose's with my own money with a Dataset and Space Invaders cartridge (around $400 at the time, in 2025 money about $1250 dollars), and then was surprise gifted a C=64 the next Christmas by my grandparents. Next major purchase was a 1541, and then a 801 printer.

I was into writing big long involved text adventure programs with complex text parsers back then, with multiroom maps you could traverse and monsters to fight and objects to collect and use, so... kind of like Zork... or a spin off of the Eliza program of the time period, or ChatGPT we have today... just more primitive given the memory constraints. Never seen by the world except by me, because we didn't have an internet or BBS's to distribute software back then. I still have one of them saved on a TRS-80 cassette tape and floppy disk as a curio in my memory box, if anyone has a way to get it off 45 year old ancient magnetic media.

From there when the 64 became terribly obsolete and computers were running at 16 mghz, I jumped to an 8mghz Macintosh SE/20.... later upgraded with a 25mgh 68030 card and much faster 80mb HD... which just one step below a Macintosh II, which was the real god machine of the time you wanted to have (not an Amiga 500... though I was very tempted and did see and play on one - they just weren't available in the states anywhere... only Europe.. and by that time, I clearly saw from all my playing on a Mac Plus, the Windowed operating system of the Mac was the no shit sherlock the future).

#helloworld #commodore #c64 #c128 #vic20 #computerhistory #BASIC #programming #8bit