10 PRINT is a book about a one-line Commodore 64 BASIC program, published in November 2012.

We’ve updated this page in late 2022: Happy 10th anniversary to 10 PRINT, which is still in print as a paperback! Book purchases support the nonprofit organizations The Electronic Literature Organization (to which all royalties are being donated) and The MIT Press, the book's publisher.

This book takes a single line of code—the extremely concise BASIC program for the Commodore 64 inscribed in the title—and uses it as a lens through which to consider the phenomenon of creative computing and the way computer programs exist in culture. The authors of this collaboratively written book treat code not as merely functional but as a text—in the case of 10 PRINT, a text that appeared in many different printed sources—that yields a story about its making, its purpose, its assumptions, and more. They consider randomness and regularity in computing and art, the maze in culture, the popular BASIC programming language, and the highly influential Commodore 64 computer.

The book is for sale at Alibris and The MIT Press Bookstore; you can also search isbn.nu for it or check MIT Press’s distributor, Penguin Random House.

10 PRINT is available as a PDF (50 MB), provided under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0 license.

Resources directly related to the 10 PRINT book:

• Photographic documentation of the book, which was designed by Casey Reas.
• A companion Commodore 64 disk, compiled and released by Martin Schemitsch (a.k.a. Martinland).

Blog posts about 10 PRINT from:

• Nick Montfort, on Post Position
• Mark Sample, on Sample Reality

10 PRINT ports and play on Twitter:

• Everything tagged #10print on Twitter
• @10_PAINT by Matthew R.F. Balousek

Teaching:

• The Coding Train by Daniel Shiffman covers 10 PRINT

Design:

• Generated Book Covers, developed by Mauricio Giraldo Arteaga, were inspired by 10 PRINT and are now used by the New York Public Library and Project Gutenberg

Art:

• Adventures in 10 Print is a free and open-source software project commissioned and hosted by Chester Visual Arts in the UK
• Casey Reas developed a related series of YES NO prints, YES NO (Software 1), YES NO (Software 2), and a set of instructions for do it called YES NO
• A generative art clock by Vincent Toups is based on 10 PRINT

There’s been a lot of 10 PRINT relevant work that has happened in the demoscene, too!

• “Thread” was the first 10 PRINT inspired Commodore 64 demo, but see the many demos referring to it and improving on it, too
• Trixter started with a tiny 42-byte PC implementation of 10 PRINT ... and sceners eventually whittled it down to 12 bytes!
• “Thread JS” is a tiny JavaScript version of 10 PRINT

There are reviews of the book in Slate, Neural, Technology Review, and Enculturation, and it’s listed as one of the best videogame books (!) in PC Gamer.

Thanks to @BedfordLvlExp on Twitter for pointing out that the following corrections should be made, all on page 229:

"leaving two more twenty-five-character rows to fill" should read "leaving two more forty-character rows to fill."

"the thirty-two pixel borders on the left and right and thirty-five pixel borders on the top and bottom were" should be "this border region, which can be set to different colors, just like the background, was"

"eliminates the need for such a border, though the Commodore 64’s KERNAL nevertheless draws it" should be "eliminates the underlying need for the border, though this characteristic visual element is stil drawn"

"In addition to wrapping text automatically, the VIC-II" should be "In addition to wrapping text automatically, code in ROM"