Show HN: I extracted BASIC listings for Tim Hartnell's 1986 book

2 points by nzduck 9 hours ago

Tim Hartnell was one of the most prolific authors during the early days of the home computing boom, writing many popular books covering genres of games on different platforms and, in this case, artificial intelligence.

I've extracted the BASIC program listings from Hartnell's 1986 book 'Exploring Artificial Intelligence on Your IBM PC' and organized them along with a PC-BASIC runtime environment and instructions so you can try these programs out yourself.

Even though the AI landscape has changed enormously since Hartnell first wrote this book, I hope one or two of you will get some value out of these program listings if you're interested in exploring the fundamentals of AI on home-computing platforms as they were in the 1980's.

Tim Hartnell unfortunately passed away in 1991 at the young age of 40, and without his writing I imagine more than a few of us would not have found the start in computing we did. Thanks Tim.