Mine were all printouts from the library from microfiche. I remember a stock trading simulator, a lemonade stand game and 3D sine wave program that was mostly in machine code.
Same here. I made a DOS spreadsheet program (with modeX charting! And formulas), a couple of games and a couple of viruses (aaaa TSR looked like magic)... I think they might be in some floppies in my mom's basement.
Mine was TI-99/4A BASIC. I wish I had a printer back then because I probably would have printed out some of my programs and I'd love to see what they look like today.
My school library used to have books full of games, text art, and programs written in BASIC that I used to type in line by line to our C64. I wish I could say I learned a lot about computer programming (I didn't) but the biggest thing I do remember was being thrilled at being able to make typed instructions turn into things happening on the screen.
These programs would get run only a handful of times, since I had no way (or it never occured to me) to save them for later use.
Tons and tons of them over the years. I wish I'd kept better track of them because I've caught myself reinventing the wheel now and again.
- When I was a kid using a DOS PC I'd write them in Microsoft QuickBASIC or Turbo Pascal and compile them to EXEs. (I used to drag a few particularly useful ones around with me until a few years ago when the prevalence of 64-bit Windows made running them on a stock Windows machine impossible.) I had stuff there like a random password generator, dumping files to VGA mode 13h (to visually look for patterns in data), drop the DTR on a serial port (to hang up a modem from the command line), search/replace on INI files, and lots of others I've forgotten.
- I wrote a proto-Markdown text processor back in high school when I was taking notes on a vTech Laser PC4[0]. It took files from the vTech and rendered output files with Epson printer formatting codes, centered text, made headings, etc.
- I regularly use a script I wrote to import my phone backups' SMS logs and dump them into my IMAP mailbox. I love being able to search all my email and SMS communication in the same interface.
- I have a podcatcher I wrote bolted onto my (heavily forked) tt-rss[1] installation to download podcasts to a local webserver for archiving and playing.
- My father persists in using a DOS accounting package for his business. A small program I wrote ingests check printing output from the DOS app (meant for dot matrix tractor-fed checks) and reformats it for sheet-fed checks in a laser printer.
- Front-end scripts for lots of command line utilities so that I don't have to remember obscure options for common tasks.
I remember as a freshman in college, only armed with my knowledge of game programming in Z80/M68K assembly (no idea of Unix or internet beyond Usenet), finding out about this shortly after it happened, printing everything I could about it, and reading these pages over and over as if it was the most amazing technothriller ever written. Files that still exist after you delete them? Executable content in email headers?
It's probably the single most fascinating event in my personal history with computers.
I am currently pulling BASIC and Z80 assembly programs from cassette tape that me and my dad wrote in the late 70s early 80s - games and robot armdroid drivers for the NASCOM 2, a kit computer from 1977.
Most run in the emulutor but luckily I have the original NASCOM2 and 2 armdroids so (hopefully) I can get my dad's physical SOMAS cube solver from his master thesis running again.
Older than that is a punch tape teletype 'program' that I wrote thank you letters for me, pausing for input of the names of grandparents.
I still do have some, I think, but I'm not sure I can currently extract them from the floppies and/or syquest cartridges I saved them on. I will scour my drives and upload any I can find.
This is the first time I've seen your project, and I love it!
The two that I would most like to find and post online were
* A matrix math tool
* A gadget that monitored a serial port for errors from a giant, industrial label printer
I also had one that was very similar to the then-popular tool BackOrifice but for macs of the day.
If I can get any of them onto a modern system I will definitely upload :)
Yes me too exactly! What brought back waves of nostalgia in particular were the pictures of robots storing variables in the boxes. I remember these were so fascinating to read, bringing the code alive.
Mine was from 1984, I recovered basic program from a Commodore 64 disk using a USB to 1541 controller. A character sheet creator for a "homicidal maniacs" role playing game my school friends and I created :-).
The first program I ever got I typed in from a book. It made a spinning pyramid on a VIC-20. It took hours and hours only for it to disappear when I shut off the computer. Tapes were amazing!
also there were magazines with full working programs (sometimes event 4 to 5 pages of "beautiful" BASIC) that you manually copied - letter by letter, number by number - into a trusted C64 (or other pre-historic computer thingie).
They were called red books ;) i loved reading through them even though i didn't know assembly and often the content was waaaaaaaay over my fragile little mind.
Ignoring OS files, it's probably class projects or postal files from the late 90s when I was in college. My family first bought a computer in 1982 but the jump from that to the DOS/Windows world didn't include carrying over any files. I did have a small program published in a computer magazine in 1985, which I have typed in and run on an emulator, so perhaps that sort of counts.
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