Code Archaeology with “Super Star Trek”

One of the most interesting things about BASIC programs is their line numbers. Often decried by younger coders as enablers of the dreaded GOTO, they were actually a clever way to enable interactive coding at a time before text editors or even (in some cases) text interfaces. More interestingly for historians, they sometimes allow for some rational reconstructions of software histories in codebases created far before modern version control systems.

A quick BASIC primer for those unfamiliar: each l...