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Life Visio

Saving Prince of Persia

Wired: “The geek squad’s goal is not simply to find out if Mechner’s old disks work. Today is about getting that old code out of its magnetic tomb and getting it onto the internet. That’s why they need Diaz’s Gordian knot of boxes and cables and not just any old Apple II — because Diaz has wired his computers into a network via Ethernet cable. Underneath, he plugs in a modern Dell laptop to serve as the receptacle for whatever treasures the crew manages to unearth.”

What a great story. A few years back I did something similar for some old floppies I’d been carrying around for years. They’ve been archived to DVD, but who knows how long that’ll last.

Once piece of code I grabbed off the floppies was my first Windows application, Tic-Tac-Toe. I’ve placed that code out of GitHub.

Maybe one of these days I’ll get around to posting more code out there. I have a whole bunch just collecting dust.

At one point I had a single 3.5″ floppily with all the source code to pre-Visio 1.0. I really wish I could find that. The UI, at the time, was so different than what was shipped. We had one tool, the pencil tool, and the toolbar icons were more rectangular. Not that I’d publish the source. I’d like to publish some screenshots.

By Rob Fahrni

Husband / Father / Developer