Cavalcade of Awesome

Earlier this week I looked at the awesome Star Wars Q&A Book About Computers from 1983. In there we got to see Artoo and Threepio show us the until then current history of computers including an awesome painting of the droids playing an upright video game.

Then I took at look at the Marvel Super Heroes Computer Fun Book Two from 1984.  In there we saw lots of BASIC code for programs based on Marvel Super Hero adventures like the Iron Man Robot Retriever and Doctor Strange and the Computer Gremlin.

Today, I’m continuing my look at vintage computer activity books with Mad Magazine #258 from October 1985.

This particular issue of Mad had a special “computer section” in the middle of the magazine. The feature article in that section was the Mad Computer Program.

The article provided code for three major BASIC platforms that you could enter into your computer and when you run the program, it would print out a special surprise output.  You can click the images above to see the code more clearly.

The guy at this website actually typed all of this code into AppleWin, a virtual Apple II emulator. After all the code is compiled what you get is an image of Alfred E Neuman and his famous catchphrase.

There were other computer-centric articles from the magazine. Here’s a great little piece with awesome artwork by the great Jack Davis. The Mad Guide to Computer Language.

And here’s an article called If Computers Are So Brilliant… with artwork by another Mad veteran, George Woodbridge.

You can click any of these images to see them BIGGER.  That’s it for my look at computer activity books this week.  Hope you enjoyed checking out these awesomely vintage looks back at computer technology.

This entry was posted on August 19, 2011 at 2:19 pm and is filed under 80s, computers, Mad magazine, magazine, pop culture, technology with tags Book Report, computers, Mad Magazine, magazines, pop culture, reviews, technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.