This is just a post about the software I created as a teenager. Nothing cutting-edge, state-of-the-art or game-changing. Just a trip down nostalgia lane to the late 90’s, early 00’s, when I started as a developer on my dad’s 486 PC.
A little while ago I finally found something on eBay that I'd been on the lookout for: an HP Vectra 33N. The exact model 486 PC we had at home when I was a kid. Al I had to do was to upgrade Win3.11 to Win95 to match my nostalgic experience exactly. (A feat that proved quite difficult, requiring an upgrade from a 200Mb to a 2Gb drive, a lot of help from a more retro-savvy friend and eventually a drive swap for another ancient IDE drive with said friend because we couldn't get the drivers to work.)
Ti-83 calculator
This acquisition was not just about using Win95 again. I could’ve used a virtual machine. It was also about the startup beeps, the fan noise, the clickity-clank of the diskette drive. And not least of all: to hook up the Ti-83 calculator from my highschool years to a Serial port and re-installing all the game I wrote at the time. I had spend many hours (and AAA-batteries) at the time curled up in a chair creating games using the Ti's built-in Basic language. I had them all backed up on 3.5" Floppy disks, stored in a box. They all worked.
I created many more games than I remember I did. A whole bunch of different puzzle games mostly, because the TI-BASIC language was too slow for platformers or action games, but also board games like Ludo and Bagh Chal, an IQ-test that stored all results to actually calculate a baseline of 100 points, and a game that almost 2 decades later would become Pebbli.
Visual Basic
My first interest in software development actually started in QBasic for DOS. I had already recovered my programs from that era and played them in DOSBox a while ago. Many of them were half-finished or too buggy to play. To my surprise, there was a plethora of programs I made in Visual Basic 5 and 6 that totally worked. Again, most of them never finished, definitely never released, but they launched, and were usable. For example, here’s a pretty decent Checkers game, with an AI that was pretty hard to beat!
The best nostalgic feeling I got from simply playing around in Visual Basic. I feel this IDE was the last one that was beginner-friendly and light weight, while being incredibly powerful at the same time. I’ve spend many hours looking at screens like this, creating all kinds of useless utilities that I never finished:
Because WinAMP was too heavy (I guess?) I made my own tiny audio player called TinyAMP (and, before it was even finished, I started TinyAMP II). It supported playlists and was even skinnable, though admittedly, it did not whip the llama’s ass.
I found a program called Hemingway, to write novels in. I used it to write zero novels. I found the first version of FindThatFont! that I later completely rewrote in XUL. I found an anti-RSI tool that measured the distance your mouse traveled on the screen and reminded you to take breaks.
What’s next?
Not much. All code is backed up on more reliable storage than floppy disks now. These programs I will never finish, but I am happy to have re-discovered my own work from over half a lifetime ago. And, I am happily playing Prince of Persia again, as well as The Incredible Machine. Most likely this PC is not powerful enough to run Unreal 99. I might need to check eBay for a Pentium 1...