Posted by Devin de Gruyl on Jul 2nd, 2007
I’ll keep this short, since the WordPress editor seems to hate my guts at the moment. Â We have learned that Jim Butterfield, one of the original “gurus” of home computer programming (particularly in the Commodore field), sadly passed away on Friday. He was 71.
A longtime icon of Commodore fandom, a former contributor of the influential COMPUTE! magazine in the 1980s, and the founder of the legendary TPUG (Toronto PET User’s Group), Jim’s contributions to the “hacker ethic” of the early ’80s cannot be understated. There are many programmers today who entered the field thanks in part to Jim and his machine-language programming exercises in COMPUTE!, or even just typing in his listing for the “JOTTO” game that appeared in just about every Commodore 8-bit computer’s manual.
Even if the name is not familiar to many of you in the current generation, those of us who are veterans of the early home-computer “scene” have lost a mentor, a teacher, and perhaps even a friend. He will be missed.
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