I extracted BASIC listings for Tim Hartnell's 1986 book
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…
I extracted BASIC listings for Tim Hartnell's 1986 book launched on October 10, 2025 with 62 votes, #384 of 8,178 launches that month and more than 95% of that year's launches. The site was still online in September 2026, 1 year on.
In plain words
This is a collection of BASIC program listings extracted from Tim Hartnell's 1986 book on artificial intelligence for IBM PCs. It includes a PC-BASIC runtime environment and instructions to run the historical programs. The project is intended for those interested in understanding AI fundamentals as they existed on home computers in the 1980s, preserving work from an influential early computing author.
written from the facts on this page · September 2026
From the sources
Archive of BASIC listings from Tim Hartnell's book 'Exploring Artificial Intelligence on Your IBM PC'. - nzduck/hartnell-exploring-ai-book
This repository preserves and provides editable electronic copies of the BASIC source code listings from the book "Exploring Artificial Intelligence on Your IBM PC" by Tim Hartnell. All source code is provided for educational and historical preservation purposes. Want to run the programs right away? We've included a ready-to-use runtime environment with PC-BASIC! cd runtime\pc-basic install-pcbasic.bat Step 2: Run Programs Linux/macOS: cd runtime\launchers run-program.bat The launcher will present an interactive menu where you can select which program to run! For detailed information about the runtime environment, see runtime/README.md . hartnell-exploring-ai-book/ ├── source/ # BASIC…from github.com
In the maker’s words, at launch
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…
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