I'm still coding now, but some of my most memorable adventures were with QuickBasic in the early 1990s, when I knew essentially nothing. My first one was fixin

I'm still coding now, but some of my most memorable adventures were with QuickBasic in the early 1990s, when I knew essentially nothing. My first one was fixing a flaky TSR "new mail" notifier that came with Microsoft Courier, a pre-cursor to Microsoft mail. I decided to write a new one which "merely" involved reverse-engineering what memory location to check to know that there is new mail, and then reverse-engineering the memory location to update to put the info on screen in the same place with the same colors. It was a drop-in replacement TSR that looked and behaved exactly like the original except it worked properly. (I made generous use of Norton Utilities to figure things out.) To this day I don't know how I came up with that approach, or why I thought I would be successful, or how I actually WAS successful. Yet hundreds of people used it for years with no issues. The other memorable app was a pop-up TSR chat app for NetWare. I sold that as shareware and made at least $500 selling it for $35 IIRC. That was the last time I made any real money from software I wrote for myself :) My code was terrible, and bug-ridden (like all the best code), but I was able to be very productive with QuickBasic and it heightened my sense that with a little effort you could do almost anything with computers.