ASIC Programming

While in high school, I taught myself the ASIC programming language and wrote several programs that were distributed through BBS (yes, that’s how old I am!).  The programs were well-received.  Here’s more about those efforts.

The titles of my programs, of which I wrote around eight or nine, included the highly successful The Insult Machine, which mimicked the old-fashioned DOS prompt. Whenever the target entered a command, a random and extremely offensive insult would result.

I also wrote a prank program that, when placed on a secretary’s desk at my school, way back in 1995, appeared to have deleted the entire day’s attendance bulletin, some that in that era was manually prepared each morning.

Every time she tried to find it, the program advised that another directory was nuked.  Of course, nothing was deleted.  It was just moved.  When she stepped away for lunch, I waited until there were no witnesses and entered the code that I programmed and everything was restored.  She came back and saw everything was back, even though it, in reality, nothing went anywhere.

Additionally, I wrote a text-based RPG game that, by today’s standards, would be considered to be sexually graphic.  What happened was that the player navigated different choices in a desperate, pathetic effort to get laid.

Oh, I remember my programming days with fondness.  Did I write anything that became super famous?  No.  Did I make any money?  Also no.  It was all done just for the hell of it.