It’s 05:30 and I’m already working… ok, let’s start with something light then.

Riyo of Bedeng.com told me yesterday about a website, which I have let my browser opened on since; Vetusware.com. It brings way too many memories from the past.

Back then, BannerMania was dominating the banner-creation scene. Pretty much all banners created by computer back then will either be created by BannerMania, or PrintMaster. It hurts your eyes after a while though, so Broderbund’s PrintShop (and much later, Microsoft Publisher) was a welcome change.

I gained fame in my university after writing an article for campus’ magazine in Assembly language, compiled with Turbo Assembler. It was a small utility written to park hard disk’s read/write head to a safe place, so it won’t crash on a data-laden sector when the computer is shut down.
A lot of my friend was amazed to see first-year student already coded in Assembly. I don’t, since high school I have seen others (high schoolers) doing it for years. Some people are really bright, it’s quite scary.

With help from PC-Tools, I’ve managed to extract data from unreadable floppies. Since floppies still uses FAT12 data structure, it was quite easy to salvage data from it using direct sector access. Still, some people thought I’m some kind of wizard or something, heh.
I prefer PC-Tools v4.23 though (the link above is version 6.0), it’s simple, does the job with none the bloat, and very small at about 100kb (I think).

Being a Pascal hardcore, I was quick to obtain a copy of Turbo Pascal 1.5 for Windows when it was released, and started coding in it. However, like Wordstar for Windows, it’s pretty buggy, and I had to abandon it.

Not many people know this, but Windows for Workgroups 3.11 was a God-send (or, for Bill-haters, Satan-send). A lot of PC was first interconnected via network with each other with this. It was more stable as well than Windows 3.1 (surprise!)
In my previous job using this, we were able to purchase less printers, and started sharing them instead via network. It resulted in a lot of yelling though, “Is the printer ready yet ??”, “Hey, insert some paper there will you”, and so on – until we introduced them to WinPopup. Then people started to annoy each other with it *sigh*.
Well, at least only us knew how to SPAM the WHOLE network,especially when we’re pissed off. Respect mah authoritah !

When VisualBasic 3 showed up, I quickly realized that I can code multimedia applications easily with it. I recorded a few nasyid into WAV files, photoshop-ed a few graphics and photos; resulting in a (back then) jaw-dropping multimedia-rich interactive demo. With lots of buttons, of course.
I donated the demo to the Islamic society in my campus for use in the campus fair (where each society presented themselves to new students). I think they had a lot of new students signed up with them then.

Before WinAmp, we had trackers. Modplay was one of it. It’s really, really amazing to hear your computer playing polyphonic sounds from the internal speaker, which usually only sounded the boring *beep*.
Later I bought Soundblaster’s AWE32, and midi files suddenly sounded so awesome.
Then MP3 came, and everything became obsolete. *sniff*

GIF2ANSI ? What the heck is that ? Well, on the “black screen” (DOS), ANSI was the graphic for the (otherwise) boring console. Believe it or not, just by using text, people managed to create astoundingly great art. GIF2ANSI makes this process simple and a no-brainer for a, well, no-brainer.

ASCIImation is where you can watch StarWars in ASCII. “Awesome” is not descriptive enough to explain it.
And in ASCIImator you can find lots of modern ASCII arts.

Right, I REALLY have to start working now. Enjoy !