Receipt tucked inside 1978 Radio Shack computer programming book

Truly interesting paper receipts are going by the wayside. They were already being phased out when I launched this blog in 2010 (I think this is the first one I wrote about), and now the demise of this kind of ephemera is rapidly accelerating. We get emailed our receipts. We crumple them up and toss them in the wastebin on the way out the door. Or we get crappy little receipts with few details. But there's still the old stuff out there for us to stumble upon. In drawers. In desks. Or tucked away inside books.

This receipt remained inside 57 Practical Programs & Games in BASIC since the day it was handwritten by the sales clerk at a Tucson, Arizona, Radio Shack in October 1980. It tanned the two pages it was stuck between at the front of the book. It was a fairly pricey book for the time: $3.95 in 1980 is about $15.25 today. But, then again, home computing was a pricey hobby. And Radio Shack was probably the go-to spot for home computer enthusiasts. It remained so for quite a while. I purchased my first PC from a Radio Shack in Gettysburg in either 1993 or 1994. 

This book was written by Ken Tracton and published by Radio Shack in 1978. The subtitle on the front alluringly states "Programs for Everything from Space War Games to Blackjack ... from Craps to I Ching!" But that's a bit misleading. By my quick count, only 6 of the 57 programs in the book are games. (And I Ching isn't really a game.)

Most of the "practical" BASIC programs included probably sound very dull to today's computer users: Annular Sections, Bubble Sort, Compounded Amounts, Fibonacci Numbers, Gaussian Probability Function, Hydrocarbon Combustion, Inverse Hyperbolic Functions, L-Pad Minimum Loss System, Points on the Circumference, Vector Cross Product. These are programs, though, that provide quick results that otherwise would have required a lot of handwritten math, a scientific calculator, a reference book and/or an accountant to work out. The whole book appears to be available on the Internet Archive, if you're interested. Commenting on Goodreads in 2015, Jerry states: "I tried a couple of the programs in HotPaw BASIC on the iPad, and they still work. Why wouldn’t they? So now I have a BASIC program on my iPad to tell me the day of the week from any date post-1752."

If it's computer games you wanted more than mathematical nerdness, there were other books at the time, such as 1978's BASIC Computer Games by David H. Ahl, and, by 1984, there was COMPUTE!'s Guide to Adventure Games if you wanted to try your hand at creating something akin to Pirate Adventure, Zork or Planetfall.