GOTO, GOSUB and the days gone

When I was a kid and the most technologically advanced and wondrous object was a Commodore VIC20 (or, even better, a Commodore C64), we spent our afternoons in front of the TV.

We were on together. We played a lot with what we had on audiotapes and, sometimes, we also wrote some code. We were too young and inexperienced to be able to write our own code, so we used to buy some magazines with listings of games written in BASIC.

It was at least two, sitting next to each other. One was reading the listing, the other was writing. Full of expectations. Sometimes a few lines were wrong. Sometimes there were typos. We fixed it and we learned something.

We didn't understand, at first, what they meant those GOTO and GOSUB words which stuffed the listing. We didn't know that they were the equivalent of the english "go to" and "go subroutine". We read them as they were written, in italian, and those strange and funny words seemed to us a little magic.

Some of us, as a result, decided to pick up a manual and finally understand how it worked, really, this 'programming' thing.

Partly because every time we finished a listing and started it, inevitably the game sucked.