Blogs

See also: part 1 and part 2. Today I will present Art Flexser‘s solution to this marble puzzle, as well as a corrected version of mine. First I will correct my version of the “pulling marbles out of a bag” puzzle recently presented by Steve Ostrom. I now understand the …

If you want to play with BASIC on a modern computer, here are two options I have found. PC-BASIC PC-BASIC from http://robhagemans.github.io/pcbasic/PC-BASIC is an implementation of the old GW-BASIC that came with MS-DOS. It allows you to enter commands directly (PRINT “HELLO WORLD”) just like the old days, and also …

See also: part 1 Well, you can disregard my previous article. I misunderstood the process Steve Ostrom was describing. I have a follow-up planned, but wanted to share Steve’s response when I explained what I thought the process was: … the probability puzzle is a little more complex. Here is …

NOTE: I got the objective of the marble puzzle wrong, but I’d already written this version. I’ll post a follow-up with the actual puzzle later. Recently in the Color Computer Facebook group, Steve Ostrom wrote a BASIC program to solve a probability puzzle. He wrote: You have 15 marbles in …

Random thought of the day… Recently, Steve Ostrom posted to the Facebook CoCo group a puzzle he was trying to work out: It’s been a few years since I turned on my Coco, even though it’s still all set up. I came across an interesting probability problem a few days …

Over in the Color Computer group on Facebook, there was a post by Phill Harvey-Smith discussing CoCo ROMs and the ROMs of the CoCo clones. Cathe Cita responded and provided a link to this cool article about the Microsoft BASIC ROM easter eggs: https://www.pagetable.com/?p=43 I got curious, and wrote this: 10 REM …

See also: part 1 My original “nicer to read, slower to run” version took 25.28 seconds to run. Here are some things that can speed it up. RENUMber by 1 Renumbering the program by 1 can save program memory (since “GOTO 77” takes less space than “GOTO 1500”, and …