Journal from Kotnik

I visited an apartment I used to live a long time ago and picked up some of my old stuff. Among them was a computer magazine Svet Kompjutera (World of Computers) I used to buy religiously. It's from April 1988, full 36 years ago. It was really fun to read it from this perspective.

The price was 1000 Yugoslavian dinars. That country does not exist anymore, and I have no idea what the price would look like today.

It featured computing lessons. This part was about programming and it was dry as you can imagine, going over boring algorithm schemas nobody uses anymore. I used to learn it old school like this, and I am happy to report learning resources are much more better nowdays. Progress!

IBM's dBase III was all the rage in 1988.

But now into fun stuff. They organized a competition of chess games, they weren't even called engines at the time, and then, as it is now, CPU power was everything so from this stage 8 bit computers were separated from 16 bit ones, since the latter were significantly more powerful. I had my horse in the game: Colossus Chess on C64. I think it's my most frequent opponent for my lifetime, and at tender age of 7, it sure did beat me most times.

Two biggest platforms at that time were ZX Spectrum 48 and Commodore 64. The magazine had assembly language programming tricks, and here you can see some scrolling effect for Spectrum. I never learned to program Z80 processor, but I can read and understand it's assembly thanks to this magazine.

Here you can see complete map of the game. These were immensely helpful and generating them required skill and hacking tricks of its own kind.

Now onto some serious PTSD! We used to type in assembly programs like this, a stream of seemingly endless DATA lines with POKE instructions that were checksumed at the end, and if you made the slightest mistake you'd have to re-type it from scratch again. Here they gave us 16KB big RAM disk on C64. Playing with these routines in monitor was source of countless fun weekends for me.

Here's classifieds section for your viewing pleasure. Software piracy was legal and you could order any game for a fraction of price. Not that we didn't want to buy originals, they simple weren't available on our socialist Yugoslavia market (we did have a market of sorts). So, games would be compressed and sold in compilations like this.

And here is the exact time I found out about Life algorithm. Some years after this I would become obsessed with it, figuring stuff on my own without having any guidance or knowing what the rest of the folks were doing since I didn't have access to any computer network.

Finally, the last page of the magazine. This is what peek PC was at the time. I am still amazed that it won computing. At that time we had multimedia power machines like Amiga and Atari that had multi-tasking operating systems and were able to display colorful images accompanied by nice music. And if you to go back in time and tell me they would lose, that they would be utterly and completely destroyed by a dull, gray, monochrome beeping box sold to accountants?! I would consider you mad.

Bonus

Finally, here's a treat for #RetroGaming fans: top games in Yugoslavia at the end of 1994. Remember, they were all almost free to us, and there was no marketing – so these lists were pure and trusted.