December 26th, 2006

While doing some research for something, I came across a website still hosting a shareware windows application that I wrote a long time ago in Visual Basic. It was a stupid little utility that sat in the system tray by the clock and sent out data to a specified TCP/IP host at a specified interval to keep a dialup connection alive (I think I wrote it for someone to keep their ISDN line up).

So I downloaded it and installed it in Windows XP under Parallels on my Mac, and much to my surprise, this program that I wrote in Windows 95 actually still works. According to that site, 152 other people downloaded it since 1998 and if I remember correctly, some people actually paid me the $5 shareware fee for using it (there was no nag screen or anything, so there wasn't a different licensed version). That bitchin' 3D logo was made in a pirated copy of Truspace3, I believe, which i also used to create the original superblock logo (which was just a blue 3d block).

According to the dates embedded in the executable, it was compiled on 1998-02-17, so I would have been 15 when i made that program. Luckily I discovered Linux shortly thereafter and stopped using and programming for Windows. Then I found OpenBSD 2.3 or 2.4 in late 1998 and have been using OpenBSD ever since.