Back in the early 80s as the home computer was becoming more ensconced into home life, a number of books would naturally show up on the bookshelves touting the wonderful things you could do with these machines of the future most of us had only seen in the movies and shows like Star Trek. Of course there were mass market paperbacks, for the popular models of computers, to be found on spinner racks in convenience stores to book store shelves; basically simpler versions of the overly redundant and boring manuals which could lull anyone into a comatose state. But there were also many books aimed at kids and teens proclaiming the fun to be had on these machines while also learning to program them with a computer language called BASIC (Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code).
These books had colorful covers making it seem like you could turn your computer into an arcade machine. The reality was that most of what could be programmed from these books were simple text oriented games, but the colorful graphics in the books made them fun to read, unlike your average computer book, and inspired the imagination of would be programmers of what the future might hold for them...I mean aside from living in their parents' basements the rest of their lives and only experiencing sex via porn video rentals and a good hand.
Chief among youth oriented computer books of the time were those published by Usborne using their tried and true colorful layout with easy and fun to read text they had so successfully used in various kids' titles for many years before they even published computer books.
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Trying to find these books on places like Amazon will introduce you to the concept of collectors' prices. They can demand quite a price, and especially if you are wanting one in decent shape. Well of all things, Usborne has made many of these vintage computer titles available as PDF downloads, and for FREE! These are not scans someone has made and assembled into a PDF file, complete with folds, dog ears and misaligned pages as is all too common on many archived books in PDF. These are professionally produced exactly as the original book layout. You could print these out and staple them into a usable book or just use them on your laptop or, my preference, on a tablet in vertical orientation.
These are great for anyone nostalgic about vintage computers from the 80s. If you have an old Timex Sinclair, TRS-80, Commodore or other vintage computer from the 80s that still works and are looking to play around with it, these books will provide plenty of material for learning and playing.
You can download them from Usbone's site HERE (scroll to the bottom of the page).
Toxic Fletch
