Comment by zabzonk
1 day ago
At the time (early to mid 1980s) I think we would say "patching". The Wordstar devs certainly did mean you to do this - the memory locations available were fully documented, and I seem to remember they supplied a small patch utility to incorporate your code into the Wordstar executable.
I remember the words "peeking" and "poking", but this may have been specific to basic.
Yes, most Basics had peek and poke commands with which you could read and write specific memory locations. For example - parentheses may or may net be needed, depending on the Basic implementation:
would read the byte at memory location 123 and store its value in X. Then
would change the byte at 123 to be 42.
But these didn't normally have so much to do with patching executables to add/change functionality.
That unlocked a memory of me seeing my computer lab teacher after class in 5th or 6th grade to ask her about the applications of PEEK and POKE. I’d picked up a copy of the GW-BASIC manual from a used bookstore. She’d never heard of those commands. Ended up promptly locking up one of the school computers by poking random numbers to random addresses.
I remember looking into BASIC sources to figure out how they did some things I had no idea how to do with BASIC... and finding POKE statements with weird numbers, it was looking a bit like magic... (I was probably 10 or so, though)
Some time before that it would have been "painting", when you used conductive paint to patch the microcode on your CCROS (Card Capacitor Read-Only Store) machine.