As I retire, my goal now is to release 40+ years of source code

I'm taking a look through DOSUTIL.ZIP and I love all these simple elegant C programs. A lot of these programs somehow only manage to have 1-2 standard c #include lines. How often do you see that? I also love how, out of 20,000 lines of C code, there only exists 24 #if statements. This is how C programming was meant to be. Reading codebases like this is one of the things I drew inspiration from when I started working on Cosmopolitan Libc.

From STYLE.TXT:<p><pre><code> - True=7 - Having lots of very low-level code and hardware experience, I developed a bit of tendancy to &quot;minimize what can go wrong at low levels&quot; - C treats 0==FALSE and !0==TRUE - most people use 0&#x2F;1 ... but thats only 1 bit &quot;difference&quot;. I sometimes use 7=TRUE as thats 3 bits with no more chars to type (and of course foolish as such a 1 bit hardware error would &quot;trash&quot; pretty much any system - but I do tend to be a creature of habit :) </code></pre> I have never heard of this convention before! Was &quot;random bitflips messing with your conditionals&quot; a common problem back in the day?

I regret not archiving my early code for good so much. First non trivial program (a snake game). First utility in assembly. First device driver (for a Centronics printer). That perpetual calendar in Pascal for a uni assignment, written with enormous hangover within an hour and still my only program written entirely bug-free to the date. All seemed trivial and not worthy of preservation then but in the end I have no code surviving from before late 1990s.<p>Take good care of your code kids!

Worth reading the Author&#x27;s recollections of his almost dying in 2019:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dunfield.themindfactory.com&#x2F;2019.htm" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dunfield.themindfactory.com&#x2F;2019.htm</a>

I love this. It has crossed my mind more than once to do something similar at some point in the future.<p>This is a bit like receiving an inheritance from your grandparents. There will be true gems and novelties mixed in with a lot of knick knacks and rubbish. But the totality of that tells a story of real people living rich and interesting lives that only a handful of highlights would not do justice to.

This is really cool. It seems very &#x27;pure&#x27; in comparison to what my code history will look like. In 2040, a lot of my code will show how I used a bunch of libraries and frameworks that nobody uses &#x27;these days&#x27;. This doesn&#x27;t seem good or bad, just a reflection of the times.

I think his most impactful utility is ImageDisk: used to archive floppy disks from many different types of computers using IBM PCs.<p>Much of the old software found on bitsavers.org (and archive.org) was recovered using this utility.

Vernor Vinge&#x27;s <i>A Deepness in the Sky</i> depicts a human society thousands of years in the future, in which pretty much all software has already been written; it&#x27;s just a matter of finding it. So programmer-archaeologists search archives and run code on emulators in emulators in emulators as far back as needed. &lt;<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;garethrees.org&#x2F;2013&#x2F;06&#x2F;12&#x2F;archaeology&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;garethrees.org&#x2F;2013&#x2F;06&#x2F;12&#x2F;archaeology&#x2F;</a>&gt;<p>You&#x27;ve made a contribution to the hoard that someone will benefit from, whether tomorrow or in 5,000 years.

Very nice. Hope you enjoy your retirement.<p>----<p>One last bugfix before retirement (this is a joke):<p>I wanted to look at micro-cad it generates a 404.<p>URL: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dunfield.themindfactory.com&#x2F;dnld&#x2F;sc&#x2F;MICROCAD.ZIP" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dunfield.themindfactory.com&#x2F;dnld&#x2F;sc&#x2F;MICROCAD.ZIP</a> Expected: I can download the .zip file.

This is brilliant.. It&#x27;s so interesting too because over the years I&#x27;ve built up a few &quot;Bibles&quot; that I always need on hand when working in a particular language or even just automation, I&#x27;ve learnt some very good organising processes (from HN to be honest), I never thought to &#x27;release&#x27; them as they feel quite personal and specific for my mental process.<p>Looking through some of these though, I think I&#x27;m inspired. Super cool idea, I would donate to the retirement project financially to say thanks if possible.

Not ready to retire, but I did something like that a few years ago with the previous generation of code I wrote: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.kmoser.com&#x2F;sourcecode&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.kmoser.com&#x2F;sourcecode&#x2F;</a>

I like to download images of old programming CD&#x27;s from archive.org, like Programmers Heaven[1] for example. All small and interesing programs&#x2F;tutorials to look at.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.org&#x2F;details&#x2F;Programmers_Heaven_InfoMagic_March_1997" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.org&#x2F;details&#x2F;Programmers_Heaven_InfoMagic_Mar...</a>

Another link from DDS is Dave&#x27;s Old Computers <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;dunfield.classiccmp.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;dunfield.classiccmp.org&#x2F;</a> , a nice treasure of old pc reviews and images, (Left, right, front and back). This is amazing as I&#x27;ve been working on making 3D assets for a project of mine.

Any one catch the out of memory comment?<p># we require more vespene gas; unix consensus; kNtErrorOutofmemory;

I like how he puts his email as a captcha <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dunfield.themindfactory.com&#x2F;contact.htm" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dunfield.themindfactory.com&#x2F;contact.htm</a><p>And slyly tells you the “password” to get past his spam filter

elvis70 are you Dave Dunfield (the source author)?<p>[It might be more a ShowHN if you are?]<p>I&#x27;m interested if all of the code is self-written? If you wrote any of it under contract and so had special terms to allow you to eventually release it? Which piece of code there that you are most proud of and&#x2F;or gonna most useful?

Quick question because I can&#x27;t actually find any info on it, but what license are these released with ?

This is great - add them to github!

Not using a standard license but rather a bespoke one is a major legal roadblock.<p>The presence of use restrictions does also disqualify it from being Open Source (OSI trademark) or Free Software (GNU&#x2F;FSF).<p>If a standard license was adopted instead, such as MIT (permissive and I believe well-aligned with the intent of the author), then any concern would go away.

I downloaded RINGSW.ZIP to check it out.<p>&gt; This file is NOT included in the demo version of this product.<p>&gt; For more information, please contact Dunfield Development Systems<p>I admire the effort, but if you&#x27;re not going to make the source freely available, what&#x27;s the point? What is somebody going to do 100 years from now when they get your .zip off archive.org and you&#x27;re long gone?

At 70, I do not think anyone has anything to learn from my 40+ years of code. I envy Mr Mindfactory&#x27;s confidence.

We need a new GPL that includes a clause that prohibits training any sort of AI or statistical model on it, unless the output of that model is inheriting the license.<p>Otherwise AI will be the end of anything open - which we can already see in stackoverflow now.

Put it on github! You might actually get people to fork it and continue working on it.

THere are reasons not to host on GitHub . There are workarounds to hosting on GitHub Google words why not put software on git hub Finds <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sanctum.geek.nz&#x2F;why-not-github.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sanctum.geek.nz&#x2F;why-not-github.html</a> OR <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wired.com&#x2F;2015&#x2F;06&#x2F;problem-putting-worlds-code-github&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wired.com&#x2F;2015&#x2F;06&#x2F;problem-putting-worlds-code-gi...</a>

This code is enjoyable to look at - it&#x27;s clean, well-documented, and clearly a work of love. I like all the small utilities that help the author accomplish a bunch of goals.<p>I wonder if the code manages be so clean because it&#x27;s only aimed at a single compiler and a single platform. Multi-platform C code tends to be messy with preprocessor goo.

This is sort of unrelated OP, but did you ever write a follow up to this post? <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dunfield.themindfactory.com&#x2F;2019.htm" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dunfield.themindfactory.com&#x2F;2019.htm</a> I’m very curious how well you’ve improved since then. -

Good idea. I should keep better track of all the stuff I&#x27;ve written...

Very cool to see such a long history, were the different projects you worked on related to what was going on at your job at the time?

Hate to say it but I remember when this stuff first came out. Thank you for releasing the code. Brings back memories.

This is wonderful. Thank you. Very moving that you choose to share this!!! Thanks for making a positive impact on the world.

Some links unfortunately are broken.

why not somewhere on git? :(?

Thank you! You show me a living history of computer programming.

I wish I remembered code my car accident made me dumb...lol

I wish I remembered how...my car accident made me dumb ...

Please put it on Github - nobody will ever find this otherwise

Respect. I&#x27;ll follow when my time come.

You have the same name as the billionaire guy. Are you him? :)

Warranty?

thanks for the tokens

Great LLM training data

Why didn’t he use more memory safe rust?