Plenty of home computers of the 1980s had a cheeky program or two doing the rounds, passed hand to hand at user group meetings and tucked into the back pages of newsletters. We have always wondered whether the Einstein ever had one of its own, and we were fairly sure that if we kept digging through the magazines long enough, something would turn up.
It has.
In March 1986 the UK Einstein User Group newsletter printed a BASIC listing across three pages, introduced with one entirely straight faced line naming its author and its title: CERTX.
Nothing about the name gives it away. The first lines of the listing do:
10 REM ****************************
20 REM *NAUGHTY BUT NICE....
30 REM *
60 REM * Free to all Einstein user
70 REM * group membersIt is dated 6 November 1985, and was generously given to the whole membership.
Type it in and run it, and after half a minute of drawing a cartoon pin up appears in red stockings and suspenders, wearing rather less on top than she might, while the screen asks WOULD YOU ?
Answer yes and it presses on with SHOULD YOU ? Answer yes again and the last of her clothes come off, the Einstein whistles, and the program delivers its verdict: YOU NAUGHTY SOD ! Lose your nerve at the second question and you get a prim GOOD FOR YOU !, and say no at the first and it sighs THATS A PITY...
Whatever you think of the subject, the work is real. There is no picture file anywhere. She is plotted as a long run of coordinates in DATA statements, which the program joins up point by point with DRAW, then coloured in with FILL and ELLIPSE, and finished with twenty sprites. The sprite shapes alone are 21 lines of hexadecimal, each 64 digits long, and every member who wanted to see the result had to type every one of them in by hand. That is dedication.
It clearly got around, too: the same program turns up on the group's public domain disc, PD151.
We have left the author's name out of this one, out of kindness. If you wrote CERTX, or you were in the UK Einstein User Group in 1986 and remember it arriving, we would love to hear how it came about, how long she took to plot, and what the committee said when it landed on the editor's desk. Get in touch; we promise to be kind.
And if you know of anything else in the same spirit hiding on an Einstein disc, we would like to hear about that too. Strictly for the historical record, of course.
CERTX will be on our listings disc for the March 1986 newsletter, alongside the scanned issue, when they join the library. We have run it only in MAME, not on a real Einstein.
