The Time I Won A Programming Competition

When I was growing up, I loved software programming - and I still do. I sometimes describe it to people nowadays like a big complex sudoku puzzle. It usually starts easy, then you get stuck in the middle bit which is challenging, but then something unlocks and you speed up at the end, excited to finish. It’s generally creative, challenging and has deep intrinsic satisfaction. (Do read Daniel Pink’s “Drive” for more on this topic)  

Something this week triggered a deep memory I had of a winning a competition. Given the internet has an archive of everything, i went doing a bit of searching (“80s computer magazines”) and within about 5 minutes I’d found it at the Internet Archive - https://archive.org/details/computermagazines

Turns out it was in November 1989 - yes, 32 years ago. The front page headline was about the new Acorn Archimedes, which some readers will know was one of the first ARM RISC processor based machines. I didn’t have an Archimedes - I was a child of the Sinclair, Commodore and PC generation - but it is remarkable testament to good design (or maybe marketing) that I am sitting here writing this on my M1 Macbook Air which is also an ARM architecture processor.

So from a time when open source meant typing in programs from magazines (a great way to learn by the way, taught me everything no amount of videos could) I present to you the winning solution for how to write a replacement for BASIC’s standard INPUT statement! 

To be fair, it stands up reasonably well. The magazine butchered the formatting, but it is reasonably well parameterised, commented and flexible given the limitations of BASIC at the time, all things you would do today. I think I would have used this when I was writing software for my Dad’s company at the time.

I went on to learn a lot of C, Modula-2 at Uni, the holy trinity of Java, Tcl/Tk and Bash during the Sun years, then extensive Python development at the same time as learning and automating cloud infrastructure.

One final bit of searching turned up the fact that the prize, "The Duel" was a driving game!