In 1982 a British child who wanted to program a computer faced a problem before writing a line: which computer? The ZX81, the Spectrum, the BBC Micro, the VIC-20, the TRS-80, the Apple and the Pet all spoke slightly different BASIC. Usborne, a London publisher of illustrated children’s non-fiction, answered it with a printing trick. Computer Spacegames printed each game once, for the ZX81, and marked every line that had to change for another machine with that machine’s symbol, and printed the replacement lines underneath. One 48-page paperback served seven computers, and many of its games were short enough to fit in the ZX81’s 1K of memory.
Fast facts
- Publisher: Usborne Publishing, 20 Garrick Street, London, founded by Peter Usborne in 1973.
- First computer titles: Computer Spacegames and Computer Battlegames, both by Daniel Isaaman and Jenny Tyler, 1982.
- Format: mostly 48-page illustrated paperbacks; the games collections of 1983–84 were shorter.
- Price: £1.99 for most paperbacks in 1983–85; TV Gamer listed Computer Spacegames and Computer Battlegames at £2.25 in paperback and £4.50 in hardback, and the shorter games books at 99p.
- Machines: ZX81, ZX Spectrum, BBC Micro, VIC-20, Pet, TRS-80 and Apple in 1982, later joined by the Commodore 64, Electron, Oric, Dragon and MSX.
- Free PDFs: 15 titles, released by Usborne in February 2016.
The games books
Computer Spacegames has twelve games, among them Starship Takeoff, Evil Alien, Moonlander, Monsters of Galacticon, Asteroid Belt, Death Valley and Space Mines, and a longer program, Touchdown, printed in a separate full version for each of six machines. Computer Battlegames, its companion, opens with Robot Missile and The Vital Message and ends with Missile! in six versions. Each book closes with ideas for “Adding to the programs”, tips on writing your own, a summary of BASIC and a conversion chart for adapting listings from magazines and other books.
The books took typing seriously, because a child alone with a listing had no one to ask. “Type the lines exactly as they are printed including all punctuation and spaces,” the introduction says, and it suggests getting someone to read the program out while you type, as long as they know to “differentiate between letter ‘O’ and zero, FOR and 4, and TO and 2”. A checklist of common mistakes follows, starting with “Line missed out”. The book expects bugs: “It is easy to make mistakes, so expect to find some.”
TV Gamer recommended the pair in December 1984 as “an excellent introduction to programming your own games”, noting that each program began with an explanation of its plot and that the explanations beside the listings covered everything from “giving monsters names, to changing the numbers of foes, to checks that you’re not cheating”. Shorter collections followed: Creepy Computer Games (1983), then Weird Computer Games and Computer Spy Games (1984), by Jenny Tyler and Chris Oxlade. Several of their programs came from outside contributors, credited by name; Micropuzzle, in Weird Computer Games, was written by Les Howarth.
Learning to program
Alongside the games came books that set out to teach. Brian Reffin Smith wrote Introduction to Computer Programming (1982) and, with Lisa Watts, Better BASIC (1983). Gaby Waters and Nick Cutler’s Practise Your BASIC (1983) was a book of puzzles and exercises. Lisa Watts and Les Howarth’s Programming Tricks and Skills (1984) covered planning, subroutines, arrays, menus and “space-saving tricks”. For younger readers the First Computer Library, edited by Helen Davies, included Gaby Waters’s Simple BASIC and Computer Fun (1984).
Machine Code for Beginners (1983), by Lisa Watts and Mike Wharton, took readers below BASIC. It dealt with both processor families of the British market at once, the Z80 of the Spectrum and ZX81 and the 6502 of the VIC-20, BBC Micro, Atari computers and Oric, with the Commodore 64’s 6510 counted as a 6502. It named its “6502 consultants”, A. P. Stephenson and Chris Oxlade. Readers wrote programs as mnemonics, translated them into hex by hand from tables at the back of the book, and poked the bytes into memory with a short BASIC “hex loader”. The book did not pretend this was easy: “Machine code is difficult and very laborious, with lots of rules to obey and small details to remember. Don’t worry if you find it very hard at first.” ZX Computing was still recommending it in March 1987, “published by Usborne at a mere £1.99”. The machine code entry follows its first routine on the Spectrum.
The range spread further: Computer Jargon and a robotics title were among the books that ELBUG, a newsletter for Electron owners, listed in December 1983. Tony Potter’s How to Make Computer-Controlled Robots (1984) had readers build a robot arm; Helen Davies’s Experiments with Your Computer (1985) and Philip Hawthorn’s Keyboards and Computer Music (1985) carried on into science and music.
Adventure books
Write Your Own Adventure Programs (1983), by Jenny Tyler and Les Howarth, showed how to plan a text adventure on paper, with a grid of locations, hidden treasures and useful objects, then turn the plan into data and a program. Its example game, Haunted House, ran in Microsoft-style BASIC on the BBC, Dragon, Oric, TRS-80 and expanded VIC-20, with changes for the 48K Spectrum and a separate ZX81 version by Chris Oxlade. “Remember,” the book advised, “you don’t need to touch your computer until you have planned your game down to the last detail.” Commodore User called it “even simpler (and cheaper)” than the Commodore-specific adventure primers, at £1.99. Howarth followed it with Write Your Own Fantasy Games (1984), edited by Tyler, which built a dungeon generator, a character creator and a game module called Dungeon of Doom.
The Mystery of Silver Mountain (1984), by Chris Oxlade and Judy Tatchell, turned the idea around. Its first half is an illustrated guide to an imaginary land, its characters and places, and “some of the pictures contain secret information”; the second half is the listing of an adventure set there, for the Commodore 64, VIC-20, Apple, TRS-80, BBC and other machines.
The pictures
Graham Round designed or illustrated most of the books, and many other names recur on the credits pages: Martin Newton, Tony Baskeyfield, Jim Bamber, Naomi Reed, Chris Riddell, Kim Blundell. The pictures carried the explanations. Reviewing educational computing books in 1984, Your Spectrum picked out Usborne as a publisher that, “following on from similarly presented books in other fields”, had produced “bright, reader-friendly books” that were “packed full of colourful illustrations — something that’s all too frequently absent from other books in this field”. ELBUG called them “very colourful and well produced”, and suggested them as Christmas presents “for the kids, if not for the grownups”.
Free again in 2016
In February 2016 Usborne put fifteen of the books online as free PDFs, from Computer Fun and Simple BASIC to Machine Code for Beginners, the four games collections, The Mystery of Silver Mountain, Island of Secrets and both write-your-own books. They are free for personal or educational use; Usborne asked people to link to its page rather than host the files. “Many of today’s tech professionals were inspired by the Usborne computing books they read as children,” the publisher said. The release came as Usborne published new coding titles, among them Coding for Beginners Using Scratch. The listings still need a 1980s machine or an emulator to run as printed. Five years later Wireframe was still sending readers to the downloads.
Sources
- Daniel Isaaman and Jenny Tyler, Computer Spacegames (Usborne, 1982): contents, credits, “About this book”, “Typing in the programs”, “Points to remember” and “Debugging programs”, p. 2–3.
- Daniel Isaaman and Jenny Tyler, Computer Battlegames (Usborne, 1982): contents and credits.
- Creepy Computer Games (Usborne, 1983); Jenny Tyler and Chris Oxlade, Weird Computer Games (Usborne, 1984) and Computer Spy Games (Usborne, 1984): contents, contributors and machines.
- Lisa Watts and Mike Wharton, Machine Code for Beginners (Usborne, 1983): credits, contents, “About this book” and “What is machine code?”.
- Brian Reffin Smith and Lisa Watts, Better BASIC (Usborne, 1983); Gaby Waters and Nick Cutler, Practise Your BASIC (Usborne, 1983); Lisa Watts and Les Howarth, Programming Tricks and Skills (Usborne, 1984); Gaby Waters, Simple BASIC and Computer Fun (Usborne, 1984): title pages and contents.
- Jenny Tyler and Les Howarth, Write Your Own Adventure Programs for Your Microcomputer (Usborne, 1983): special note (naming Introduction to Computer Programming), contents and “About this book”. Les Howarth, Write Your Own Fantasy Games for Your Microcomputer (Usborne, 1984): credits and contents.
- Chris Oxlade and Judy Tatchell, The Mystery of Silver Mountain (Usborne, 1984): “About this book”.
- Tony Potter, How to Make Computer-Controlled Robots (Usborne, 1984); Helen Davies, Experiments with Your Computer (Usborne, 1985); Philip Hawthorn, Keyboards and Computer Music (Usborne, 1985): title pages and imprints.
- ELBUG vol. 1 no. 2, December 1983: “Book News” (the £1.99 price, the titles listed).
- Your Spectrum issue 3, May 1984: educational computing books.
- TV Gamer, December 1984: book recommendations (Computer Space Games and Computer Battle Games, prices and machines; the 99p games books).
- Commodore User, February 1985 and November 1985: Write Your Own Adventure Programs at £1.99.
- ZX Computing, March 1987: Machine Code for Beginners at £1.99.
- Wireframe issue 52, June 2021, p. 74: Mark Shepherd on Computer Spy Games and the free downloads.
- Usborne, “Who was Peter Usborne and what was his role in the company?” (web, secondary): Usborne set up in 1973. https://faqs-us.usborne.com/article/207-who-is-peter-usborne
- Wikipedia, “Peter Usborne” (web, secondary): founded Usborne Publishing in 1973. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Usborne
- Shaun Nichols, “Ready for a nostalgia kick? Usborne has put its old computer books on the web for free”, The Register, 9 February 2016 (web, secondary): the fifteen titles, Usborne’s statement, the new coding books. https://www.theregister.com/2016/02/09/usborne_programming_books_now_free/
- “Usborne Releases 1980s Coding Books As Free PDFs”, Raspberry Pi Spy, February 2016 (web, secondary): Usborne’s terms of use. https://www.raspberrypi-spy.co.uk/2016/02/usborne-releases-1980s-coding-books-as-free-pdfs/
- Open Library catalogue records (web, secondary): Brian Reffin Smith, Introduction to Computer Programming (1982). https://openlibrary.org/search?q=introduction+to+computer+programming+usborne+reffin+smith