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Post by kaos116 on May 23, 2006 1:17:32 GMT -5
My mom is in the processes of moving. While packing, she came across a box of some of my high school stuff. Talk about a blast from the past. There was a 5.25" disk box that had an Apple sticker on it. That box had alot of great memories of late nights playing 'Wizardry" or finally getting a program to run. I pulled out the Apple IIc and started looking through the disks. They all still worked, 25 years later. One of the programs was something I wrote for a computer contest. I didn't win, but I always thought it was neat. It actually never did predict the future, but it would if I had let it run long enough. What it did is sequentially run through the complete alphabet and numbers in 40 columns. It started with 40 "a"'s then it would increment the 40th column to 'b' then to 'c'. When the 40th column had gone through all possible letters, numbers and punctuation, column 39 would goto 'b' and the 40th column would start all over again. With it doing this, at some point it would have come up with "george w. bush will win the 2000 election." and "5/30/06 powerball numbers 3,5,15,24,36" of course it would give you wrong information too.
So, what programs did you write as a kid that you thought would change the world, but you were the only one that thought that?
Todd
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Post by Jeff Ledger on May 23, 2006 15:08:24 GMT -5
I had something like that happen to me. Back in the mid-80's I remember working on a BASIC program which would transmit a type of text code from one computer to another by modem. The receiving end would read those codes and translate them to graphics on the screen. The idea was to see if we could send both text & graphics live over a dialup connection. Looking back years later, I realize that I wasn't the only one working on this type of system. <smirk> That's the one thing that retro computing did that doesn't happen today, it provided perspective on where the industry was headed. We knew what possibilities were on the horizon even if we couldn't implement them ourselves. Jeff
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