‘80s Word Puzzles and the Atari 800 — My Origin Story
I can trace why I became a software engineer to a moment in time, about 40 years ago, when I was thirteen years old.
Everyone has an origin story. This is mine.
Word Puzzles
Sometime in the early 1980s, my family received a simple word puzzle in the U.S. postal mail. The mailer explained that if we were able to complete a series of puzzles, we’d win a prize. There was no fee, so we figured “why not?” I don’t recall what the specific prize was, but it was clearly enticing enough to solve the puzzles and pay the twenty cents to mail it back in.
We’d send in the answer and a few weeks later, the next (slightly more difficult) puzzle in the series would arrive. The initial puzzles were undoubtedly pretty easy to solve. This went on for — who knows how long — until we got The BINGO Puzzle. In my head, I hear “The BINGO Puzzle” in the deep voice and reverb of an announcer at a monster truck rally.
The BINGO Puzzle
As I remember it, The BINGO Puzzle looked something like this:
The premise is pretty simple. Each letter in the alphabet has a point value and a word’s score is the sum of all the word’s letter values. We had to find the highest value 5-letter word that started with a ‘B’ (for the first row), that had an ‘I’ as the second letter (for the second row), and so on. The columns did not need to form valid words.
My re-creation above uses Scrabble letter values because most people are familiar with the game and grok how its scoring works. What the actual numbers were is unclear, but I assume, like Scrabble, it was based on letter frequency, where letters that occur more rarely had higher values.
In the description above, it says to use “your favorite dictionary,” but I’m pretty sure a particular brand and version must have been mentioned so that all contestants were on equal footing. If I had to guess, it was likely the Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary.
In addition to having the right dictionary, solving this problem requires plenty of free time, matching skills, and error-free math. Even at thirteen, I realized a computer could find the right words far more easily and quickly and with less chance of error than doing so manually.
Atari 800
I was quite interested in computers and I really wanted an Apple II, because that was what the “cool kids” had. But at around $1,300, it was pretty pricey. I had to “settle” for an Atari 800, which was about three-quarters of the cost. Still, a thousand dollars was a lot of money back then (equivalent to over $3,700 today), and I was fortunate to have an Atari. I paid for at least half of it using money earned from my Cleveland Plain Dealer paper route. The rest was a gift from my parents.
Apple might have gotten all the kudos at the time, but the Atari 800 was a hidden gem. I won’t opine at length about the Atari computers (for a nice homage, see How Atari took on Apple in the 1980s home PC wars).
I will, however, give a shout-out to two of my favorite games of all time: Miner 2049er and its awesome sequel Bounty Bob Strikes Back!.
I also had the Atari BASIC cartridge, which I had used for some toy programs like this old gem:
10 PRINT "HELLO, DOUG!"
20 GOTO 10I spent countless hours typing in sample programs from the manual and computer magazines. But, as with any computer language, it takes solving a real-world problem to become truly proficient in it. With The BINGO Puzzle, I now had a real-world problem to solve and I could actually win a prize doing so. Plus, I could potentially justify the money we spent for the computer to some skeptical parental units.
I had two big things to figure out. The first was writing the puzzle-solving code. The second was sourcing the list of 5-letter words.
The Code
I don’t have the original code I wrote. Unfortunately, it is lost to the sands of time. I didn’t have a printer. The only medium for saving things was on cassette tapes via the Atari Program Recorder and any tapes I created are long gone.
Yet, for this post, I wanted to try and understand the complexity I faced writing this program, so I decided to build the solution in a modern programming language. I implemented it in Go, the language I currently use professionally. It didn’t take more than a few hours to get things into a “done done” state, including writing a few unit tests and adding documentation. You can find the source code in my dougs-origin-story git repository, along with some commentary about the code.
As computer programs go, to a professional software engineer, solving this problem is pretty easy. In fact, it is on the order-of-magnitude complexity that the core logic could be written in a forty-five minute coding interview. However, I don’t feel like this captured the spirit of what I accomplished when I was thirteen.
So then I thought, “How about trying to re-create it in BASIC using an Atari 800 emulator?”
I found old Atari manuals to re-acquaint myself with Atari BASIC and how the editor worked. I fired up the emulator and set to work.
Hoo boy, that was a bit of a shock to the system. Probably the biggest surprise is how rudimentary things were back then. The screen was 24 lines by 40 columns which is tiny by today’s standards.
There was no cut/copy/paste or undo/redo. You couldn’t even scroll back, and the error messages were cryptic. There were really no files to speak of — everything was in-memory.
Compared to today’s tools that have auto-complete, syntax checking, highlighting, custom colors, multiple tabs and windows, and much more, it was — well — pretty basic.
I quickly decided I would not spend the time to implement the whole solution in BASIC. However, I did spend some time creating a proof-of-concept demonstrating how I might have loaded the dictionary words into the program. The resulting BASIC code is documented in the git repo and is visible in the animated gif on the above left.
To be honest, it wasn’t trivial for me to figure this out today, with all my professional experience. I’m surprised I figured this out as a novice.
Nonetheless, with a bit of grit and determination, I ultimately got all the code working. But how did I get all those words from the dictionary? That would require some social engineering.
The Words
There was no Internet available to consumers in the early 1980s. By some accounts, its official birthday wouldn’t come until January 1st, 1983. I couldn’t just Google “5-letter words.” I couldn’t Google anything.
My only choice was to literally go through a dictionary and type in each 5-letter word that I found.
This proved to be time consuming, so I crowdsourced — or should I say family-sourced — the work. I recruited my Mom, brother, and sister to help out.
Down to the basement we would go, sitting in a wood-paneled corner lit by a Tiffany-style lamp where the Atari 800 rested next to an old television set. Page by page and word by word, candidates were found, marked with a highlighter, and typed into the Atari BASIC editor.
How long did it take and how many words did we ultimately end up with? The Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary is over 900 pages and has 75,000 words. According to this cool site on word length frequency, 5.2% of English words have five letters. That would make for approximately 3,900 words.
A quick-and-dirty analysis using data from my Go version shows that about a quarter of 5-letter words match the BINGO criteria. Assuming we entered only matching words along the way, it would have been about 975 words, or over ten screens of four words per line.
I bet it took a while.
As an aside, having humans participate in this manner is not all that different from how machine learning algorithms work today. For example, humans are still needed to manually “label” maps so that self-driving car algorithms can recognize things like stop signs or no parking zones. I guess some things never change.
The Solution
Finally, thanks to help from my family, we eventually got (what we hoped) was a complete list of all 5-letter words.
When I ran my program, I was ecstatic to see it yield something like this:
BOOZY - 19
FIZZY - 29
ZANZA - 23
ZINGY - 18
MEZZO - 25
-----------
TOTAL - 114For the purposes of this article, I used 5-letter words from the Scrabble dictionary to produce the result above (see the dougs-origin-story git repo for more options).
It’s hard to guess how closely this matches the actual solution from 40 years ago, but it can’t be that far off. I’d like to think that “Boozy” was the correct B word.
The Next Puzzle
We sent in the solution found by my computer program and a few weeks later we got the next and final (?) puzzle, indicating the program had found the correct answer. And, thankfully, my family had not missed any important words in the great-dictionary-word-entry-marathon!
I had done it! I felt like I pulled something off. I somehow tricked the contest company and gamed the system. Bwahahahaha!
Unfortunately the next puzzle was a doozy. I wish I had a copy of it, but I seem to recall it was effectively a huge blank crossword grid where one had to not only find proper words, both horizontally and vertically, but also use the highest-value words possible. Maybe the New York Times puzzle editor was covertly looking for new puzzle authors? Or maybe it was a secret government program seeking out word savants.
Needless to say, we did not even attempt this puzzle. It exceeded my programming skills at the time. And besides, there was no way my family was going to get behind typing in all the remaining words in the dictionary!
I’m guessing personal computers soon meant the end of puzzle contests like this. Fortunately, these days we have our daily dose of Wordle to get us by.
Recollections, Anyone?
Part of the reason for publishing this post is to seek out anyone who might recall these contests. I have so many questions! Who ran them? Was it even legal?
How was this managed? Probably on paper. This was the early 1980s, so it’s very unlikely a spreadsheet or computer program was used. I imagine some person in charge of opening up the submissions, scoring the answers, and manually mailing the next puzzle. It would be great to meet this person.
What was the ultimate prize and did anyone ever win it? Did that person use a computer?
If anyone has recollections or insider-knowledge of these contests, please drop a comment below.
Closing Thoughts
I may not have won the contest, but to me the prize was successfully coaxing a computer to solve a real-world problem. It cemented my interest in computers, opened my eyes to what was possible with them, and proved I had some technical aptitude.
I never lost interest in computers. I went on to get a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science from Denison University and then make it my career. I’ve been programming ever since, and it still gives me joy when I can convince a computer to do something cool.
Everyone has an origin story. What’s yours?
