Oh wow. This was the first computer book I ever owned. My parents bought me an Apple IIc when I was 11, causing me to nearly wet my pants, and I'm quite certain that everyone in the neighborhood heard the screaming.

I spent hours and days typing these programs in. Occasionally, they even worked.

I was 10, but this pretty much describes word for word what happened in my house.

I was 28 but pretty much had the same reaction.

Same here, though I had to get this book from my school library. High School library. Years after my 520 ST was already out of date. I programmed in the basketball game, which took about an hour or so, as I recall. The next year I got a Mac LC III and joined the modern age.

Great book though.

I gotta say, it was weird for me to do my daily visit to Hacker News and see my own site on the homepage.

I run www.atariarchives.org and www.AtariMagazines.com (started that site in 1996. It has the full text of a bunch of old computer magazines including Creative Computing and Antic and more). I also run FlightSimBooks.com, full text of classic flight simulator books.

If you want to help out with this stuff, find me at www.savetz.com. Need reliable volunteers.

Also, if you love and remember the robot cartoons in the book, visit the artist's page at www.bekerbots.com

I've got most of those games up in http://telehack.com/

Just type basic and then dir to list them.

Just played Hammurabi. Never seen it before but that's a fun game!

starwars in ascii! Wow!

The follow up book, "More BASIC Computer Games" is also there: http://www.atariarchives.org/morebasicgames/

You can show your age by pointing out that BASIC is an acronym and should be all-caps... :\

Oh man, I remember going to my uncles house and spending hours trying to decide which program to choose, this book and others. Then Id spend the afternoon typing it in and trying to get it working.

If I was real lucky I'd get it going and get to show it off, or occasionally if there was time Id try and write out a two player one so I could share with my sister.

I must have only be 7 or something. I used to look forward to those visits so much... and being blown away by "The Hobbit" I wanted to play that game so much...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hobbit_(1982_video_game)

My fingers started to hurt when I saw this...my first programming environment was flat-keyboard Atari 400 with a BASIC cartridge.

Oh man, the membrane keyboard. Now, did you save your files to cassette or did you have the Atari disk drive? The Atari 800 was a very decent machine. I remember having to translate some statements into Apple Basic on the ][+ and getting confused trying to debug things after running renum when then line numbers no longer matched what was in the book.

Cassette of course! If I remember correctly, it took 30 minutes to load programs I had written. Maybe it just seemed that long to me, or maybe that was the write times.

I was so happy when I saved up enough money to buy an Indus floppy drive. It was heaven compared to the damn 410. I still cannot believe how much typing I did on the Atari 400's keyboard.

I miss Antic and Creative Computing.

I typed in many of these, but I still don't remember any that were particularly fun, even back then :)

This was the book I learned how to program with. I had actually not seen the cover since I lost it way back when. So, thanks for the trip down memory lane.

Out of curiosity, did any Atari computer owners on HN, have the Action! Programming language cartridge?

I had this when I was a kid. I picked up a copy on eBay a few years back.

Blast from the past- I remember typing these in as a kid.

Is that Bill Gates right of the robot?

To be fair, all the 8-bit computers I used in the 80's had Microsoft BASIC in ROM. Oddly enough, the Ataris didn't use Microsoft's interpreter.

And the Atari 400 my brother had, we had to buy the damn BASIC cartridge separately.

Of course, my brother became a Star Raiders ace, rather than a programming ace like me, ahem.