Wow. I totally forgot that Commodore BASIC ignores spaces in variable names. I do remember that it ignores anything after the first two letters though. That said, there’s a bit more going on here than meets the eye.

PRINT HELLO WORLD is actually parsed as PRINT HELLOW OR LD, that is: grab the values of the variables HELLOW (which is actually just HE) and LD, bitwise OR them together and then print.

Since it’s very likely both HE and LD were undefined, they were quietly created then initialised to 0 before their bitwise-OR was calculated for the 0 that appeared.

Back in the day, people generally didn’t put many spaces in their Commodore BASIC programs because those spaces each took up a byte of valuable memory. That PET2001, if unexpanded, only has 8KB in it.

</old man rant>

some people just want to see the world

BOOBS
BOOBS
BOOBS
BOOBS
BOOBS
BOOBS
BOOBS
BOOBS
BOOBS
BOOBS
BOOBS
BOOBS
BOOBS

That code is to computer porn as the Hunt the Wumpus is to computer games.

Everyone’s heard of the “Hello world” being people’s first program, but just as popular among teenaged boys is their second, more advanced program: Boobs! :)

if you flip it over it spells 80085

I had to go look up when those things came out (1977) because by the time I got my hands on one in 1982 in the school library they were already little more than toys even when compared to the luxurious Vic 20.

I know we played some games off cassettes on them. I feel like Oregon trail was one of those games, but I’m suspicious of my own memory because I know I was playing that on my Apple 2, which I think had joystick driven hunting on it.

God I’m getting old and can’t remember the finer points anymore.

I do remember that other kids bullied the HELL out of me for carrying one of those plastic boxes full of floppies with me at school. Not a good time to be a nerd back then.

run

I can’t believe it’s already been 23 years. What a long way we’ve come.

READY.

Is that a time machine museum because I ran that exact code more decades ago than I care to think about?

Such a fun museum, so many cool pieces of hardware I’d never have the chance to see in person.