The Automatic Proofreader

The Automatic Proofreader is a series of checksum utilities published by COMPUTE! Publications for its COMPUTE! and COMPUTE!'s Gazette magazines and various books. These programs allow home computer users to detect errors when entering BASIC type-in programs. They display a checksum for each line which can be compared against the one printed in the magazine; if they are the same then the line was typed correctly. The program was initially published for use with the Commodore 64 and VIC-20 in 1983. The Automatic Proofreader was later made available for the Atari 8-bit family, Apple II, IBM PC, and IBM PCjr. Commodore versions The Automatic Proofreader was first introduced in October 1983 for the Commodore 64 and VIC-20. This first version had separate versions for the VIC and 64; the following month, they were combined into a single listing designed to work on both systems. This version of the Proofreader would display a byte-sized numeric value at the top left corner of the screen whenever a program line was entered.