A Digital Clock in BASIC
Now that I have my Atari 130XE back up and running, I am starting to type in more of my programs from my Blue Binder of Programming.
Some of these programs are several pages long and will take me a while to type in because the 130XE keyboard is actually pretty awful. So for this post, I’ve started with one of the smaller programs which displays a digital clock on the screen and has an alarm function.
Before, I continue, a brief aside about how awful the 130XE keyboard is. There are really two main problems. The first is that the keys are not always where you expect them. Back in the early days of computing, keyboards varied quite a bit between computers. The Atari computers had non-standard things such as the double-quote being on Shift-2, which constantly messes me up since that is used a lot in BASIC programs. The < and > keys are also in odd positions, as are +, -, *, etc. My brain is so hard-wired to touch type on standard keyboards that I end up making a lot of typos when typing on the 130XE.
The second big problem is that the keyboard has a terrible feel. They keys require a lot of force to press them, which means typos aplenty.
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