In my process of scanning lots and lots of old PCC issues, today I stumbled across two very interesting ones:

September 1975 People's Computer Company Vol.4-No.2

Later that year Dennis Allison will answer Bill Gates famous 'Open Letter to Hobbyists' by proclaiming an free BASIC language called Tiny Basic. Now in the september issue he gives "Design Notes for Tiny Basic":

SOME MOTIVATIONS

A lot of people have just gotten into having their own computer. Often they don't know too much about software and particularly systems software, but would like to be able to program in something other than machine language. The TINY BASIC project is aimed at you if you are one of these people. Our goals are very limited-to provide a minimal BASIC-like language for writing simple programs. Later we may make it more complicated, but now the name of the game is keep it simple. That translates to a limited language (no floating point, no sines and cosines, no arrays, etc.) and even this is a pretty difficult undertaking.

Originally we had planned to limit ourselves to the 8080, but with a variety of new machines appearing at very low prices, we have decided to try to make a portable TINY BASIC system even at the cost of some efficiency. Most of the language processor will be written in a pseudo language which is good for writing interpreters like TINY BASIC. This pseudo language (which interprets TINY BASIC) will then itself be implemented interpretively.

To implement TINY BASIC on a new machine, one simply writes a simple interpreter for this pseudo language and not a whole interpreter for TINY BASIC.

And already in the next issue some readers reported to have written their own version of TB. Amazing. Free software was born.

January 1976, People's Computer Company Vol.4-No.4

This is the Space Games issue:
Here Bob Leedom, (who kindly sent me all this PCC's newsletters for scanning) proudly presented his enhanced version of the BASIC game StarTrek: Super Star Trek (SSTR). It became the most popular game for a long time. A clever gameplay, a ambient enviornment, you could almost feel to be inside the USS Enterprise. With this Newspaper you get the complete description of the game and a extended gameplay (today something like twitch) and the sourcecode for typing in.

What a iconic issue. It will be framed!

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yours,
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