I posted this little story to Reddit and I thought the HN crowd might get a smile out of it as well. I'm sure I'm not the only one who was overly protective of their work at a younger age. The good news is that I was able to remove the sitelock by decompiling the SWF.
Younger me definitely had an inflated opinion of my own early BASIC programming work, and very secretive about the source code. (C)(R)(TM) etc. Now I wish I had copied that floppy.
I somehow managed to preserve source and all my personal files from my very first personal PC 30 years ago until now (a religiously copied backup folder back then, now NAS with cloud backups).
I’ve looked at my first source code (Pascal and Basic). It is…. Not pretty.
Younger self thought it was cool to use the shortest possible variable names and avoid indentation or even spaces if I could. And spent an inordinate amount on building ANSI and VGA text user interfaces to brag with on the BBS programming club… the functionality was secondary to whether it looked “elite”!
I've unfortunately lost many of my early projects, but I remember that younger me thought single-letter variable names were really cool. I spent a lot of time using box drawing characters to try to mimic a GUI in DOS. I was totally infatuated with "dosshell"[0] which was included with my copy of MS-DOS 5.
Ha, cool! I also tried to copy Turbo Vision[1]. And unsuccessfully tried to create a library for a UI like Universal Improved Patcher[2] (you can run it in the DOS emulator).
I have a similar story about the batch scripts I wrote in highschool to circumvent the monitoring software. Someone stole my script and made it out like they had wrote it. So in retaliation I added copyright notices to the comments and printed similar notices when the script was run. I even planned to rewrite the script in C# and distribute it as a binary.
In hindsight if that script was ever seen by a staff member I'd essentially have self-snitched.
Thanks for this, it gave me a laugh. There's something beautiful about how we see the first few things we create. We think everyone will love them as much as we do. I remember my first game made in Visual Basic- it was this close to being a hit- just missing some better graphics, and better code, and actual fun gameplay.
