Wednesday, October 11, 2017

1980s Usborne computer books made free for download!

Wow! I actually missed out on this story, but Usborne has made their 1980s computer books for kids free. You can download them here.


The books were written at a time when computers came loaded with BASIC, with each computer having their flavor of BASIC. A good bet if you want to run the programs in these books would be to find something that can run BBC BASIC, or a BBC Micro emulator. Or if you own one of these machines like the Apple II or Commodore 64, you can dig it out from the storeroom and see if it boots.

If you want to run BBS BASIC on a modern day machine, try BBC BASIC for SDL 2.0 or BBC BASIC for Windows.
If you want to run these programs on a BBC Micro emulator, give JSBeeb a try. You can find its code at GitHub which includes instructions on how to run a local copy.

Try searching the Internet for emulators of other machines such as the ZX Spectrum, the Commodore 64, the Apple II, and the TRS-80.

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