The Strange Pleasures of Retyping Computer Code, Over and Over and Over Again

Back in the 1980s I did it all the time — and it was weirdly fun

Code for Conway’s “Game of Life”, from the 1979 book “BASIC Computer Games”

I first dove headfirst into computer programming during the summer of 1981, when my father’s friend lent me his VIC-20.

He’d bought the machine figuring that, hey, computers are the wave of the future…