Well, Hi there!
My name is Delyan Raychev, today is January 1st, 2021 and it feels like the right time to start something new.
One winter day in the late 1980s my parents dropped me (a kindergartener) off at my grandparents’ house in southern Bulgaria. Left me and one of these:
This plastic Pravetz box came with a book on BASIC - full of short snippets of sample code. I had fun trying to type out various short LISTings from the book.
The best part of the Pravetz computer was - the first thing you saw when you turned the box on - the name of the machine (ПРАВЕЦ) and a cursor: ]█

The blinking green box invited you to type out your first BASIC command.
Jumping from the late 1980’s to July 2020 when I saw a tweet from Sal Collora, who had a freshly refurbished a working Commodore 64…
I got an opportunity to rekindle that old feeling of typing out my first line of source code - so I embraced it. My Commodore 64 arrived, I plugged it in, turned it on and there it was - the BASIC prompt again.

It is so incredible - flip the switch and you are dropped in a BASIC world. All you have at your disposal are 71 keywords. It seem like a tiny and suffocating space and yet it is a fascinating world of endless exploration. Here is one line of code, my favorite, to prove this with an example:
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
In the 1980s this extremely concise BASIC program appeared in so many printed sources - it became a cultural phenomenon. Nick Montfort and colleagues wrote an incredible book on the topic.
While I do aspire to analyze word by word every snippet of code I post here, and I intend to do this weekly, the 10 PRINT has already been elaborately studied in the 10 PRINT book (PDF).
Very peculiar (to me) is the 205.5 number in the code. This number plus a random float between 0 and 1 results in printing either PETSCII character 205 (\) or 206 (/):
The maze with the 205.5 and a random sub-1 float would look like this:
But my second-grade daughter wanted to see what happens if the numbers change, so she tried tweaking the 205.5 to all sorts of other numbers. Here is the same program with 215.5 instead:
The instant feedback from changing a number and then RUNning the program gave my daughter hours of entertainment, exploring Commodore 64 character sets. This reminded me of the great times I had exploring all the things the Pravetz 8c can do.
This is a blog about reading code and we did just that today. This is one simple line of BASIC code but it sparked the imagination of many kids and adults who in turn created great software. This great software is what we will examine scrutinously in this forum here!
Tune in and subscribe for more of our code reading adventures weekly!