DatabaseFOUR (1983, 112
KB zip) and
DatabaseTWENTYTHREE (1988, 472 KB zip)
In its time the standard in desktop databases, Ashton-under-Lyme originally launched DatabaseFOUR in 1983. It rapidly achieved success and wide usage, partly thanks to the company's legendary marketing skills (as is well known there never was a DatabaseTHREE, the name was just a scam intended to suggest stability), and partly because nothing else existed.
Ashton-under-Lyme's bosses always made a virtue of their lack of programming knowledge and laissez faire approach to technical management, but this proved to be the company's undoing. The long-delayed upgrade from DatabaseFOUR-and-one-third plus plus to DatabaseTWENTYTHREE failed because the 876 programmers hired to produce it spent most of their time arguing over who should go and get the coffee, and none at all doing design, or quality assurance. Not like you at all.
In the end DatabaseTWENTYTHREE shipped in an appalling condition — for example some modules were omitted because they could not be made to compile — because it was thought that the striking increase in version number would conceal the product's other deficiencies. In the event, perhaps surprisingly, nobody was fooled. Nobody, that is, unless you count the man who went on to buy the company...
Exciting things to try when you have downloaded these programs: Run up DatabaseFOUR and see the much-admired 'user-friendly' environment, ie a full stop with a cursor after it. List the contents of the example Contacts database. Sort the database by Zip code. List its contents again. Get bored and quit. Well, what else did you expect from an obsolete database tool?
Run up DatabaseTWENTYTHREE. Admire the BSOD. Reset your machine. Delete DatabaseTWENTYTHREE.
CB-Basic (1983, 4 KB)
A home-grown competitor to the American Gee-Whiz Basic, Cor Blimey! Basic was the power in the ROM behind a string of fine British computers in the early- to mid-eighties. Great machines such as the Oxford Incompatible 80, the ITV 2, the Welsh Spaniel, the Smith-Nuttley Quantum Limp and the Oxford Incompatible 83 Colour Upgrade with 12 KB Option Pack [that's quite enough fine British computers — Ed] all booted up with CB-Basic's familiar WOT?> prompt.
CB-Basic was most advanced for its time. It allowed three-letter variable names instead of just two, as had previously been standard Basic interpreter practice. Soon programs featuring exciting and clearly-named variables such as CAT and DOG joined the legions of programs with less exciting variable names like CT and DG. Also, CB-Basic allowed (in fact required) all its keywords to be entered with single keystrokes. This was a great boon to a generation of hobbyists who had yet to acquire speedy typing skills. Instead of having to bash in the word 'FOR' as F-O-R, one simply pressed Ctrl-Esc-Fn-#.
Things to try: Type in a program to compute biorhythms, copied out from any issue of Practical Computing you can find in the loft. Run it. Enter your date of birth and today's date. The program prints out three meaningless numbers. Are these the correct meaningless numbers, or does the program need debugging? Now remove all the spaces and comments from the program. Also remove any unnecessary line numbers, renumber those remaining so that they are consecutive, and shorten variable names to one letter. Run the program again. See how much faster that is? I knew you would.
Wee C (1978, 427 bytes)
In its way, Wee C was forerunner of the GNU compilers of today. Originally written for an article in the pioneering journal Dr Strange-Bob's Magazine of Computer Programming and Hygienic Drill-less Dentistry, Wee C was an attempt to show that it was possible to create a perfectly viable C compiler that could run on the exceedingly primitive desktop machines of the day. True, one had to discard some of the frills and gadgets of C compilers on larger machines. Things like floating point arithmetic, multi-dimensional arrays, structs and unions, heap memory management, and the assignment statement.
Severe though these restrictions were, pioneering users flocked to Wee C with an enthusiasm that overcame all difficulties. Jim Fleeble from Leeds wrote a program to output an uppercase 'A' which compares favourably with such programs as written nowadays, and later on Angela Ealing from Acton produced her own Wee C masterpiece: an application to input a character.
Things to try: Write a program to output an uppercase 'B'.
Big Blue's Top Dog (1985, 35 MB)
Long before we had the loveliness that is Windows, it was discovered in the top secret Laboratoire Grand Bleu near Winchester that it was theoretically possible to 'multitask' two or even three programs at once on a single PC. After many years of extensive research, Top Dog was launched to exploit this theory.
An engineering triumph, Top Dog literally allowed you to run up to six copies of EDLIN at once in 15 character by 3 line text mode windows, plus one copy (or two or three if you liked!) of the special Top Dog 'clock' application. But all this proved too heady an experience for most punters, and in due course Top Dog was superseded by Big Blue's own fine new operating system 'Two', which allowed you to run up to one MS-DOS program at a time, rather slowly.
Things to try: While your colleague is out, secretly install Top Dog on his machine. When he comes back, say you have just installed the latest Windows 2000 trial CD. Watch his face while he wrestles with Top Dog under the misapprehension that it is the latest technology from Redmond. Explain the joke to him. Have a good laugh together. Stop laughing, suddenly.
Supermarket Adventure (1980, 28 KB)
In these days of multi-player shoot-em-ups, youngsters wonder how the folks of olden times passed away the long evenings after silent television closed down at 6.00pm. The answer was, of course, that Father plugged the television aerial into the Smith-Nuttley Quantum Limp, and the family all gathered round for a satisfying game of Supermarket Adventure. To give you a flavour of the game, I can do no better than reproduce a little of the dialogue that it produces:
> GO NORTH
Verity, you are in an aisle with soap powders and fabric conditioners
> GO NORTH
Verity, you are in an aisle with dog biscuits and cat food
> GET DOG BISCUITS
Verity, don't understand 'GET'.
> TAKE DOG BISCUITS
Naughty Verity, you mustn't steal!
> BUY DOG BISCUITS
Verity, cannot buy, not at checkout
> PICK UP DOG BISCUITS
Verity, don't understand 'PICK'.
> GRAB DOG BISCUITS
Verity, don't grab it's rude!
> DOG BISCUITS IN BASKET
Verity, you are in an aisle with dog biscuits and cat food
> PUT DOG BISCUITS IN BASKET
Verity, don't understand 'PUT'
Things to try: Sadly, we found that our Smith-Nuttley Quantum Limp emulator crashed when we tried to load this game. However, a modern equivalent is freely available; it's called 'Buying a Virgin cheap day return to Stockport'. Boom-boom.
[If you are interested in following this historical trail, here are a few URLs to get you started — Ed. http://www.bricklin.com/history/vcexecutable.htm (VisiCalc), http://community.borland.com/museum/ (early releases of Turbo Pascal), and http://www.cs.bell-labs.com/~dmr/primevalC.html (an early version of Ritchie's C compiler)]