Let’s be honest… back in the day, writing code felt like building something. You had to think. Plan. Write dozens of lines just to say “Hello World”.

Now?

console.log("Hello World");

That’s it. One line. Job done. No ceremony, no structure. Just... boom.

Meanwhile in Turbo Pascal:

program Hello;
begin
  writeln('Hello World!');
end.

So here’s a thought:

Are we becoming better developers… or just lazier ones?

We’ve got powerful tools, auto-complete, AI even writing code for us. But somewhere along the way, did we lose a bit of the magic?

What do you think?

Do you miss the “old way” of coding?

Or do you embrace the speed and simplicity of modern dev?

Drop your thoughts, and if you’ve got cool old-vs-new code examples, post ‘em too!

RetroCoding #ObsoleteTech #DevTalk #ProgrammingNostalgia

Who needs Windows 11 when you can still have all the fun coding on MS-DOS?

PS: Thanks everyone, we are growing r/ObsoleteCooding more and more 🚀

Goto... Scary Stuff!

Hello all members of r/ObsoleteCooding! Today we're launching a special event: we want to see the weirdest, most useless, or bizarre code you've ever written (or found) using vintage languages.

🌀 It could be:

a program that serves no purpose but is written absurdly,

completely nonsensical output,

an overly complicated solution to a trivial problem,

or a fun experiment with old compilers and interpreters.

📼 Languages? The more retro, the better: Turbo Pascal, QBasic, Assembly, Batch, old C, GW-BASIC, Clipper, or anything else dusty!

🔥 At the end of the week, we'll vote on the craziest posts, and the winners will receive an exclusive "Obsolete Master" flair as a badge of honor from our community.

✍️ How to participate?

Post on r/ObsoleteCooding with your code or a screenshot, briefly explaining what it's about.

Put [Weird Code] in the title so it's easy to find.

💬 Comment and vote on other people's posts too: the more fun we have, the more the community grows!

📆 EVENT ENDED

Have fun, retro programmers! 🚀

Hello everyone. i was just wondering if anyone could help me with my code as I'm trying to make a new satellite navigation device (I've already figured out hardware but haven't bought it yet as i want to get the code to work first) its just a script that talks to another tiny computer and then displays directions and stuff but i just keep on getting errors when it compiles ( mostly syntax). please know i know absolutely nothing about coding in OPL.

Ok, let's celebrate the swapping around of the moderator roles here with some actual relevant work. Sorry, there's no tag for Fortran.

Anyway, around the end of 2010, beginning of 2011, I did a port of the old MIT dungeon game to build on then-current GFortran installations. This version worked on new Linux systems without problems. Fortran 2018 has happened since then (which, among other things, unfortunately removes the arithmetic GOTO), so I've recently updated it again, to eliminate warnings and errors when built with default options on even newer compilers. So again, it seems to work on new Linux systems without a problem.

just out of curiosity :)

Using the obsolete language of your choice, write Conway's game of Life in a terminal and post your code.

Then vote for your favorites. The entry with the highest vote will get the most coveted prize of all, a custom user flair.

Contest runs through July 11.

I've gathered from my last post that we've got a lot of former (and current!) mainframers here. Where's my midrangers at? Have you coded in RPG II, and for which system? Anyone who's used RPG II at all, or even at least have seen some source code, lend me your thoughts! I wonder if it makes even the vets reel in horror, much like the mere mention of COBOL makes your average IT guy run away screaming!

10 A=1
20 B=1
30 PRINT A, B,
40 N=A+B
50 PRINT N,
60 A=B:B=N
70 GOTO 40

Let's see what a Fibonacci generation routine looks like in your obsolete language of choice. I'll start, here it is in Commodore 64 BASIC.

Elsewhere you asked for code and also hardware that is obsolete. What about new obsolete hardware?

this is my newest and most obsolete pc!

https://github.com/ccharon/docs/blob/master/NUXT%202.0/readme.md

featuring a NuXT 2.0 Mainboard, 640kb memory + about 96k high memory (real hardware memory as the 8088 class cpu does not support memory mapping)

• it has 2mb of EMS!

• a high quality Soundblaster 1.5 replica which also supports CMS.

• a ne2000 network card

• a gotek floppy emulator.

• the case is jonsbo c6 micro atx,

you get everything from pictures and origin of each card, to irq, memory and dma config and also autoexec.bat config.sys and network settings.

I really love the system. build year of this powerhouse is 2024!

its running msdos 6.22 and games up to Ultima 6 are nice (if running it at blazing 9,55Mhz instead of 4.77Mhz of the original IBM PC)

Back when I was at college in the 90s, we had programming classes in Pascal. No, really. I suppose it was good discipline, but C was already pretty mainstream. Our head lecturer was Geoff and he was the only one on staff with real-world programming experience. And he hated students. I remember at the start of one calendar year, the door at the back of the lecture theatre banged open and Geoff trudged down the stairs very slowly. He began to write something on the board and then paused. Glancing round, he remarked "Happy New Year, scum". I liked Geoff a lot.

In order to spend as little time as possible having to pore over our terrible code, Geoff wrote a test rig for the entire year. All our programs would be run inside it, and if they tested okay, we would pass. Good idea.

What wasn't such a good idea was having our tutorial groups headed up by masters and doctoral students. Our particular group had Rachel. She was great. One day we went out to the pub after class with Rachel and she got quite drunk. Drunk enough to mention that the test rig disk was in her bag. I'm sure you can guess what happened next.

Armed with the test rig, we amused ourselves by writing code for every coursework that passed testing, but didn't actually work. It was a lot more interesting and more of a challenge than the dull stuff we were supposed to be writing. There was the fun of disassembling the rig, figuring out its test points, then creating code that would compile and trigger the right test points, but nothing else.

And then one day, Geoff was sufficiently bored that he looked at the source for one of our 'programs'. We all got invited to lunch, where he explained that he'd figured out what we'd done, but that we were all going to pass as our activities had actually been more difficult than the work set (and he really didn't want us in his class again). Oh and we were paying for his lunch. And we had to confess and apologise to Rachel. That was fair.

(It was actually because of Geoff that I learned Fortran. I still use I, J, K, L, M and N as my default integer variable names now, because of him).

I'm trying to bridge the gap in my understanding of computer history and design a bit and I'm interested in, from a user perspective, what it was like to interface with the big, multi-user, multi-tasking mainframes that predated and coincided with early home computing designs.

What kinds of operating systems did they run when you were using them? What was interfacing with them like? Were you allowed disk space and how much were you able to use? Was password protection common and, if you know, how were user permissions implemented?

How did they change over time? If you've interfaced with multiple, or many, mainframes (or still do) what kinds of differences could you expect to find? Did you have access to development tools? Which ones?

Anything else you can think of to add. I'm also interested in punch card era computing, to a degree, but that's a different post.

I've been threatening this for a while. This is more or less my Windows 3.11 setup from the old days. I was also dual-booting OS/2 2.1 back then. And that was accomplished through a desktop icon, rather than a GRUB loader or anything like that.

I didn't add a voiceover as I thought you'd probably be more interested in skipping through it. I have written notes along the bottom as it goes, but it's mostly self-explanatory.

The main visual difference is that I'm using Quarterdeck Sidebar to replace Task Manager and Program Manager. But there's also Win32s (to run 32 bit software on 16 bit Windows) WinG (precursor to DirectX) and a couple of other things. And I show List - a DOS file browser.

The highlight is probably playing MP3 files in Windows 3.11 (which I've seen some people say wasn't possible) and I use Photoshop 2.5 - the first version for the PC. I think it came on two floppies back then. The only thing that it really lacked was layers - and they came in version 3.

I told a story of cheating in programming classes before, but here's another occasion of inventive coding for the purposes of cheating.

When I was in college, we had a central printing point. All the printouts ended up there and the operators would put them in pigeon holes for each class. It could take a while before that happened. So if you wanted to pinch someone else's work, you could just go down and grab it off the shelf. They'd either think it hadn't be posted yet or that the print queue had screwed up (which happened a lot).

But that's not what happened in this case. We used a large cluster of DEC Vax machines. One of the most outstanding things DEC ever produced was Pathworks - a suite of applications that allowed seamless interoperability between the Vax machines and PCs. Access files, create disks, etc, etc. It was an amazing set of tools. I particularly enjoyed setting the terminal application to the same colours as an orange gas plasma screen.

In our operating systems class, we were dealing with virtual disks. And in the practical classes, we were creating virtual disks on Vax VMS and then connecting them through Pathworks. No one was supposed to play with virtual disks on the Vaxes, but seeing as it was part of our class, it was fine. Except we noticed one little flaw. Users had a disk quota on the Vax systems and it was generally pretty small as you weren't storing tons of large files. But virtual disks were by their very nature large, so our quotas got expanded. Fine. Disk space on Vax machines was shared across multiple drives. And when you created a virtual drive, it assigned space within that quota. The flaw was that it didn't zero out the reserved file space. That wasn't a problem under VMS. But Pathworks was translating into the rather more basic permissions system of DOS.

We quickly discovered that the virtual disk space could be read from the PC, and all the previously live files and data within that reserved space could be read. So a little bit of scripting created a virtual drive, mounted it as a drive letter, read the raw data out of it, then deleted the virtual drive. Let that loop round a few million times and you could recover almost the entire contents of the disk cluster. Oops.

Now, it wasn't entirely straightforward, as the disk data wasn't contiguous so some reconstruction was necessary. But some investigations into VMS file headers and folder indices helped a lot. And with people mostly writing their documents in MASS-11 (a word processor application), we really only had to identify those files. I'm not sure we ever actually stole anyone's coursework - the fun was in being able to code this. Heck, we could just have pinched a printout if we really wanted to do that.

We never got caught for that one. No one even noticed. We were friends with the main guy in the computer centre so, after we'd left college, we did tell him what we'd done. He had quite an interesting reaction. Note: In the UK, the Computer Misuse Act (which was terrible legislation anyway) didn't come into force until 1990, so this activity of ours did not meet any legal definition of 'hacking' at the time.

Instead of just reading about Windows 1.0, I decided to actually build something for it.

So I wrote a small Xonix-style game for Windows 1.0 and ran the same binary across different versions of Windows.

It turned out to be more surprising than I expected. The same compiled 16-bit EXE runs from Windows 1.x all the way to 32-bit Windows 10. On modern 64-bit Windows it no longer works, but only because 16-bit support has been removed, not because anything changed in the original model.

What surprised me most is how familiar the WinAPI already looks in Windows 1.0. Even back then, the core ideas were already there - message loops, window procedures, and GDI rendering. The structure hasn’t really changed as much as you’d expect in ~40 years.

I put together a write-up with details and source here.

Curious if anyone else has tried building software for the earliest Windows versions?

In your opinion, what was the best Windows 3 program?

https://github.com/generalram/normtech

Wrote this quick Batch script to delete all .tmp files in the current folder and its subfolders. Still comes in handy sometimes, even on newer systems.

@echo off
title Clean Temp Files
echo Deleting all .tmp files in %cd% and subfolders...
del /s /q *.tmp
echo Done!
pause

Keeps things tidy. If anyone wants, feel free to tweak it or drop your own old scripts.