I was rooting around in my filesystem today (9/7/03) and found that I still have a QBasic program I wrote! I'm not sure how old it is, but it's probably going on a decade. It's kind of strange to find the remnants of my thoughts from so long ago. I must have passed this down through many hard drives and operating systems in an effort to preserve this bit of history for my future self.

It's a little wireframe 3d rendering demo. I remember at the time I had found QBasic demos other people had written on BBS's. When I looked at their code, I couldn't understand it at all. The people who wrote them seemed so mysterious and god-like at the time. I couldn't conceive of how anyone could construct a program with such abstraction as to make a plasma cube (those were popular back then).

My program was very primitive compared to the other ones I saw, but I remember feeling a great sense of accomplishment because I worked it all out by myself. I think this was shortly after I discovered the purpose of arrays. It seems silly, but I recall there was a significant gap between when I understood the syntax and semantics of arrays and when I understood why they were useful. I thought to myself ‘Gee, so I can refer to a variable by saying something like ‘x[2]’ instead of ‘b’. What's the point?’. After looking at some else's program, I finally realized that I could put a variable in the array subscript and then treat each element of the array the same way, even if I didn't know which one it was! This was a really exciting concept.

Anyway, enough nostalgia. You can see the program if you want, which you probably don't since it really only has sentimental value to me.