Top 5 hit!

I've just discovered I had a hit with a programme I wrote! :)

Back in late 1986 I sold something called "The Beeb Editor" to Micronet for their telesoftware downloads. For my Viewdata site I've been processing the Autumn 1989 edition of LogOn magazine, sent out to all Micronet Members, and just discovered it was number 4 in the top BBC downloads. 3 years later. I obviously missed this first time around.

I've actually still got the contract in my file (in my mum's name, for some reason, but signed by me,) but I have not got a clue what the program actually was any more. I'll have to have a good search through my discs to find a copy and see.. Worse, I don't recall receiving any payments for it, either..

Ephemeral Coding

I was thinking, last night, about the many programs I've written over my time, and I suddenly realised that the vast majority of them are now completely redundant, and that sort of saddened me. All that time and effort now feels wasted and my efforts are completely forgotten. So, just in case anybody is interested, here are some of the things I've either been paid to write, or were major unpaid projects, that are now of no use whatsoever:

Programs for use with the Prestel viewdata service:
SuperSub - to assist main IPs manage their Sub-IPs.
MailboxMassacre - bulk email handling software.
StopPress Viewdata terminal - the only implementation I knew of that correctly handled double height characters.
AutoF - moderated "bulletin board" and message handling system.
Various modules for the Autonomic Viewdata host.

Programs written in the BOS operating system
Almanac - Room booking and management system mainly used by Local Authorities.
Syrian - took over this EPOS system and almost completely re-wrote it.
COMP - poor mans' IDE for BOS Cobol/SpeedBase, handling macro for recompiling different versions of a project.

Programs written for use with WorldsAway (V.1 of what is now vzones "Dreamscape")
Various game hosts.
Various client mods to add functionality.
Clone server, written in VB. (And to be clear, I had NO access to any existing server code: it was written simply by seeing what the client did when I tried to talk to it.)
Clone client for UNIX, only good for "parking" an avater.

Web Applications
Various PHP based applications to solve puzzles that were being run on the Quiz Call TV channel.


I'm sure there are lots more, but that's what I remember for now.

What's most irritating, is that I can't actually think of anything that I've written that's likely to still be in use, apart from some code contributed to other peoples' projects. (e.g. the econet code in BeebEm.)

Some Old Poems

I found some old "poems" of mine in some ancient files ..

Sing a song of goblins,
a pocket full of elves.
Four and twenty white mice,
talking to themselves.
Conversation falters,
elves and mice get free.
Run of in the undergrowth,
ever live happily.



Once upon a goblin time
when goblin poems were deemed to rhyme
and grass was green, and the earth stood still
and folk were pink, and never ill,
and life began at birth, not death,
and men were men, and all the rest,
that time was great, and never dull,
and now just look, the earth is full,
and grass is blue, and ground does move
and folk are green, and never groove,
and life is death, and men are dead
and all because, it once was said,
that goblins don't exist no more,
it's all superstitious dumb folklore


(c)me, sometme in the late 1980s.