A session of link hopping caused me to hunt down a program I wrote for the Amiga in 1994. I didn’t really think I would be able to locate it, but once again, I underestimated the power of the Internet.
Not only did I find it but Aminet, the entire archive where I published it, is actually online!. The software is an accounting program called Banker which featured a fairly complex user interface. I was actually using a GUI toolkit called MUI (Magic User Interface) which was extremely impressive for its time. It featured complex widgets with support for a lot of listeners, on the fly reloading of resources and skins, localization, etc…
The only problem with MUI is that it was a bit ahead of its time processor-wise, so user interfaces written with it tended to be a bit sluggish. But it was totally worth it.
Back to Banker, I realized while browsing its entry on Aminet that the archive contained its source, so I suddenly became very eager to see the kind of code that I was writing sixteen years ago. The archive is a .lha, another format that was popular on the Amiga, and for which I was quickly able to find a decompressor running on Mac called DropUnLha.
I was bracing myself, expecting the worst, but… well, it’s actually not that bad. I uploaded the whole project to github.com for posterity, and here is one of the sources. Check out this cute comment ASCII art at the top of the file, neat, uh?
My only regret is that I wasn’t able to come up with any screen shot of Banker, even in this review of my program from a Dutch magazine, so I would need to run the the Amiga emulator to really see what it looked like.
How about you, dear readers: what’s the oldest piece of code you’ve been able to dig up?
#1 by Dianne on March 16, 2010 - 9:49 pm
Nice! I still have my Amiga stuff on my home page (and yes I still have a home page, though increasingly out of date):
http://www.angryredplanet.com/~hackbod/amiga/
#2 by Lawrence Kesteloot on March 16, 2010 - 10:14 pm
I found a cassette from 1981 of programs I wrote on my TRS-80 Model III. I digitized them and wrote a program to decode the 1500-baud signal into bits, then a program to decode the BASIC tokens. Despite being labeled “Tape A”, I don’t think it was the first set of programs I ever wrote; these seemed too complicated.
#3 by Dominique on March 17, 2010 - 2:48 am
I never found back the code that I wrote back in the 1990 on my 8086, and my amiga. Floppy are too sensitive, after a couple of year you never get anything from it, specially the cheap one.
But this post remind me that It is amazing how fast soft/code become useless, I am almost sure that all the code that I wrote 10 years ago, is not use anymore.
Dominique
#4 by BoD on March 17, 2010 - 3:44 am
I lost all my old sources after a hard disk crash in 2001 (NO BACKUP). I’ll never forgive myself 🙂
But I do have an old cassette tape of Thomson MO5 programs. Some day I’ll look at it and have some fun.
#5 by Ole on March 17, 2010 - 6:51 am
I found some old Turbo Pascal code from 1994. It was almost unreadable, and had almost no comments.
BTW: That German magazine appears to have been written in Dutch.
#6 by Cedric on March 17, 2010 - 8:06 am
Ole, you are right, I updated the post
#7 by Stefkos on March 19, 2010 - 6:23 am
Well, I’m still programming with using MUI. The last version is 4.0 and it’s coming with MorphOS. Want to know more -> http://www.morphos-team.net
#8 by p-OS on March 19, 2010 - 6:38 am
Yes, MUI was very impressive. And it became even lots more impressive since the time you used it last:
– Changes in Preferences will show the effect onto your application in realtime/immediately
– a nice scaling engine (for images)
– support for alpha channels (so non-rectangolar windows or transparent objects (windows, buttons…) are possible)
– window menus
– UTF8 support
– nice 3rd party classes for viewing HTML, showing pictures, minimalistic OpenGL support, lately (not sure if exists as public class yet) watching H.264 and OggTheora videos…
– support for hardware accelarated (GPU) graphics outout
– Public Screen Manager allows to assign skins to your screens
and many more …..
btw, never heard of Banker, is it better than Homebank (that I use daily) ?
#9 by AlexC on March 19, 2010 - 7:28 am
I downloaded and launched your program to grab some screenshots:
[IMG]http://i43.tinypic.com/103ftco.jpg[/IMG]
That’s what it looks like on AmigaOS 4.1 with my custom MUI settings (so it would probably look much better with the default settings) 😉
#10 by p-OS on March 19, 2010 - 7:51 am
BTW, there’s no need to search for an Un-Lha tool for Mac OS, as OS X can unpack those archives out-of-the-box already
#11 by Ventzislav Tzvetkov on March 19, 2010 - 8:09 am
MUI even today is one of the best things of the Amiga. Back in 1990ies it was slow on 68020 processors and it was shareware as well. So if you were not registered, you can not customize it and enjoy all the great features of it. Today with AmigaOS 4.x the speed is no more a problem and registering is not required at all.
#12 by Simon on March 27, 2010 - 11:48 am
I still have some old AMOS games I coded when was about 15 (transferred 10 years ago from a floppy to an adf file). I just downloaded AMOS and I am a little scared to look at the code I wrote back then, but it is really cool that UAE makes this possible at all.
One of the games is MasterMind, I remember creating the “graphics” in DeluxePaint!
#13 by Jeff Dickey on April 13, 2010 - 9:18 pm
While going through and throwing out accumulated cruft before moving out of the States 6 years ago, I came across 3 boxes of keypunch cards that I’d had since 1981 or 1982 (from the scrawling on the boxes. Reading through the first dozen cards in “BOX 1” took me through a time warp… here was the ALGOL source code (and the last set of data files) for a “computer dating” program I’d written back in college, which ran on a Burroughs B6700 mainframe. It was really crude (now); a series of multiple-choice question answers and user-assigned weights given to about 80 questions. The program would then do the expected analysis – eliminate total incompatibilities (‘yes, absolutely’ and ‘non-negotiable’ compared to ‘no, absolutely’, for instance), juggle the weights and produce a series of report pages listing the ID-code numbers and relative scores of the top ten matches for each client. (For those of you wondering about privacy and stalking 30 years on, all that went onto the cards were ID numbers, matching entries written [in longhand] in a dead-tree notebook which has not been seen since the Eocene… or the early ’80s, if there’s a difference.)
Pretty basic stuff, now; you can whip up a Web survey using your scripting language and back-end database of choice in a couple of hours. But it was still a nice jog down Memory Lane, to the second software project I ever had that made any money. And, not having an ALGOL compiler for either Mac or Linux immediately to hand (anybody know of any?), and having more pressing uses of my time, I can’t even say what the code looks like beyond what I remember… what today would be insufferably procedural, structured code, no doubt with mountains of spaghetti code waiting to trip the unwary.
But, then, it was fun and it did what it was supposed to without visibly obvious problems. Thirty years on, there are few projects I’ve worked on in the interim that I can praise more highly.
#14 by blue lock on August 26, 2010 - 4:14 am
I am impressed not only with the internet and its ability to back track and find things from long, long ago but more so with you. From your words, it is evident the kind of pleasure you derived while actually writing this one. And you have put it so humbly that it was ahead of its times, in what way is immaterial. And from the comments I can make out that MUI is still pretty popular. And to all these laurels you have reworked on it for Mac users.
#15 by Keeper Garrett on February 17, 2011 - 7:49 pm
I really love that marble background. I never had any workbench except 1.3. I wonder if I should dig around for a way to upgrade it.
#16 by MaggieL on February 28, 2011 - 12:18 pm
I have some FORTRAN I wrote in 1968, but it’s on paper tape…
#17 by Jenny Parfum on April 6, 2011 - 12:47 am
This reminds me of my old Amiga where I used to play games (I’m getting nostalgic ;-)). Interessting to see that there are something like Amiga emulators.