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Back in the old nostalgic 1980's there were these very cool guys making fantastic programs for the Apple II, the Beagle Bros.

Among the very cool stuff they publish there were these amazing two-line programs which could do unbelievable things with very little code: as far as I remember it was Uncle Louie's two-line contest - because Uncle Louie was said to have an Apple II soooo old it only had 512 bytes of memory (lol), and thus could only run basic programs with at most two lines of code (since each line of basic code could contain at most 256 bytes, AFAIR).

I don't know where those programs came from (if from the Bros themselves, or from the general public), but they are amongst the most fascinating and creative code I ever seen so far (yes, until today): there were music players, text editors, amazing animations, complete games, puzzles, and so on. All of that using at most 512 bytes of code.

So, where can I find these programs, and is there an Apple II emulator that can actually run them?

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    Dear lord... those programs where fantastic, someone should have it on a previous-millennium floppy disk :)
    – Arc
    Mar 31, 2022 at 14:56
  • you might try asking around on some of the Apple II forums that are still around.
    – jwh20
    Mar 31, 2022 at 16:17
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    I should also mention that the Facebook group Apple II Software Enthusiasts has had one and two-liner contests over the past few years, and people sometimes post new ones there.
    – Nick Westgate
    Apr 1, 2022 at 23:08
  • @NickWestgate, very nice link suggestion, have been wondering around it with so many good memories to recall, thanks.
    – Arc
    Apr 2, 2022 at 0:22

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Your most likely bet is the Beagle Bros Software Repository

IIRC, some two-liners are on the software disk images. Others might be in the catalogs and bulletins. And some of them were collected into a 15-page section of The Big Tip Book, starting on page 216. The ones in that collection have the names of the submitters in a REM statement.

Sometimes, just every now and then, the Internet is awesome.

(If you can afford it, and feel like it, you can donate to help support the archive. I have no affiliation to this endeavour, BTW.)

As for running the two-liners, those in disk images can be run in any of the many Apple II emulators. The Big Tip Book has OCR text, so you might be able to copy the text and paste it into an emulator to run. (In AppleWin on Windows you can use Shift-Insert to paste text as though you typed it.)

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