Uploaded June 2026 | Updated September 2026, 3 weeks ago
Today we take at an early-access chip design game called Hard Chip. And the title is apropos.
Thumbnail image: "Sadie Pfeiffer, Spinner in Cotton Mill, North Carolina" (1910) by Lewis W. Hine
Today we take at an early-access chip design game called Hard Chip. And the title is apropos.
Thumbnail image: "Sadie Pfeiffer, Spinner in Cotton Mill, North Carolina" (1910) by Lewis W. Hine
![Wordle - on an Apple ][!](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/Q76OnQnY4w8/mqdefault.jpg "Wordle - on an Apple ][!
This week’s video is about Wordle, BASIC, and 8-bit computers. It’s based off a great tweet from one Katie Anderson, katie_panda on Twitter, who wrote a BASIC version of Wordle for the BBC Micro computer, and then went so far as to make a “magazine page” for it in the style of the old game listings from Creative Computing.
For those of you too young to remember this, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, one of the most popular ways of distributing programs wasn’t disk, or even cassette tape, but just…paper. Magazines would have program listings in them - sometimes very, very long program listings, and you would type them in to your computer, run them, and probably save them to cassette or disk yourself. Katie went to the trouble of making this BBC game, so today we’re going to type this listing in to an Apple ][ and see if it works.
When you’re transcribing a game like this, there are three main types of errors. First, sometimes you’d simply type something in wrong. Second, sometimes the programs in the magazine themselves would have typos. Third, sometimes the program would be written for a computer other than the one you were using, and so the commands wouldn’t work the same! Today, I can almost promise you that we’ll see all three of these sorts of errors.
The fun part, though, is that it was the process of encountering and fixing these errors that gave a lot of people their start in programming. Typing in a program is definitely a ponderous way to get your start in computers, but it’s actually a surprisingly effective way to learn.
Let’s hop over to the Apple ][ and get to work.")
