The first "serious" C program I wrote was a GIF87a decoder on Linux, using SVGAlib, back in 1998 or 1999. The reference implementation I had was written by some

The first "serious" C program I wrote was a GIF87a decoder on Linux, using SVGAlib, back in 1998 or 1999. The reference implementation I had was written by somebody else, in QBASIC of all things. So I just translated it into C line-by-line until it worked. Of course the resulting program was not pretty at all, and I don't really think I understood how it worked, but I learned a lot. It was my first experience learning how to not write good C programs, something I am still trying to avoid today.