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I was pissed when I discovered that the cassette tape containing all of my c64 programs was gone. Most of them were crappy, but there was a D&D character generator I wrote when I was 8 that I'd made extensive use of for quickly generating randos for us to play one-offs with.

The oldest publicly released code of mine is SLIPShuttle, which provided pushbutton connecting to the internet on an Amiga (the cmdline interface was terrible). Written in AREXX https://aminet.net/comm/tcp/SLIPShuttle.lha

The second oldest was ringconnectd, which allows you to "ring knock" your (POTS connected) modem to make it connect to the internet and mail you your IP address. It was VERY handy while I was in college, and apparently it took off in Africa a few years later as their internet connectivity grew. https://www.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/system/network/daemons/rin...

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Out of curiosity, what's the use case for ringconnectd? Just to find out what your IP is? What would you need that for back in the day?
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Dialup systems typically spent most of their time offline. If you wanted to connect to one over IP you'd need some way to get it to dial back up to the ISP, and then some way to get the new address it'd ended up on.
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Yup, and phoning a number wouldn't incur charges unless the other side picked up.

ringconnectd never answered a call, but rather listened for a ring pattern that you could specify. So what I'd typically do is go to a payphone, dial my line at home, let it ring twice, hang up, get my money back, dial again letting it ring twice again, hang up, get my money back again, then go to the computer lab to wait. My system at home was configured to connect after the ring pattern [ring, ring, delay, ring, ring]. It would then wait 30s, connect to its ISP, and email me its current IP address.

I did it this way because I was already using the terminal for pretty much everything, and we didn't get dedicated machines on campus. So it was better to just hold my work on my Linux machine at home and connect to it from the lab.

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I definitely remember doing that as a kid, and I remember bending the thin metal off some broken ones. Whatever brand I was using allowed that metal to work a bit like a spring, you could launch it by compressing it. (Sorta like the frogs you find in Christmas bonbons.)
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If you loosen the metal cover just right you can make it go absolutely sailing across a computer lab (or any room, I bet).
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A while ago I learned that very early versions of 3.5" floppies didn't have the auto shutter mechanism and you had to open and close the shutter manually. (I think that was probably just used on some Japanese Sony machines.)
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Looking back over any code older than 12 months is always like archaeology, at least if it is my poorly documented tech-debt ridden nonsense.
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haha true.

My favorite part is when I start cursing loudly "what hipster doofus wrote this pile of steaming horse crap?" as my eyes bleed Ark of the Covenant style from unblinkingly debugging poorly documented code in a company with a huge codebase only to realize a few seconds later that it’s mine from several years back, when I first started. The old “we have met the enemy and he is us.”

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Definitely can still feel the spring sensation.
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