My First Published Program

Back in 1992, it was still common to type in computer programs and games from listings in magazines. I had a ZX Spectrum. You could buy computer games on tape - either budget, or premium ones. There would often be some for free on a tape attached to magazines. But the tradition from earlier years of typing them in from listings was still in full flow.

In 1992 the leading magazine for the ZX Spectrum was "Your Sinclair". I had a fascination for computers and programming, and had decked my computer out with a "Plus D". This enabled the loading and saving of games and memory snapshots to a floppy disk. It was a revolution! But it wasn't exactly full featured. I wrote a program called Attrib that extending the functionality to allow recovering of files and to set if they are hidden or not. And I sent it in to "Your Sinclair", who printed it. In the following 30 years it turns out that things are being digitised and preserved and the listing, in the Your Sinclair May 1992 issue, is available on the internet. Given the world wide web was only invented a couple of years prior and wasn't really a public thing until a year later, that's unexpected. Here's the listing:

Beware of typing it in and running it though, my recollection is that there are a number of misprints in it (notice the different font size for the listing, it seems to have been modified to fill space and probably retyped with typos). The corrections to try are (from another source, not me!):

80 PRINT " - ";w$((PEEK 50000)+1)

90 FOR f=50257 TO 50266

110 PRINT " - ";w$((PEEK 50256)+1)

270 SAVE @1,z,q,50000