My First Computer Article

The very first article I published appeared in issue 39 in October 1979 Volume 4 Issue 9 of: Dr. Dobb's Journal of COMPUTER Calisthenics & Orthodontia. It was callled: Just Poking Around with my PET.

The articles mentioned on the front cover of this issue were: tiny BASIC for the F8 by Jerry D. Fox; Page List for the Apple by Robert D. Diaz; Just Poking Around with my PET by Gary Ratliff; Producing Pictures on Your Computer with a Diable Printer by Jay C. Bowden and Anna K. Scharschmidt;Quick and Dirty Routines for the Sweet-16 by Steve Wheeler; and Main Software Teletype Terminal Interface by Donald Faulkner.

The article appears on pages 22 and 23 of this issue. It concerns poking various registers on the PET computer. It also shows how to list the secret locations on the early PET. For some reason Commodore decided to block access to the BASIC ROM's of the early machine. When one attempted to peek in these locations all they received for their effort was the reply of zero. So one had to learn to program in 6502 assembler to crack into this area.

Also firms offered a set of disassembled listings for this area. However, Commodore soon changed their policy as the release of the 6502 Assembler packages and the many articles showing how to explore this area showed them that this area was not such a dark secret.

When Suzane Rodrigues then editor of the magazine wrote me that my article had been accepted I was thrilled. Also I thought I was a born computer journalist and soon began submitting many other articles to kilobaud and COMPUTE!. All was well and all articles were accepted until IBM released their computer in 1981. They thought they invented the Personal Computer and soon people clamored to read about the PC and no longer desired to read about the old PET computer.

I soon received my first rejection slip for what I thought was one of my best articles. This was called Studies in Computer Philology and dealt with using the
chrget routine to obtain a real time chart of the commands used and frequency of use of the BASIC commands in a running program.

In a few days this article will be over 30 years old. There were no links to this article found. However, Dr. Dobbs survived the longest of the early computer magazines. I do still have a copy of this entire magazine.