Amiga, MUI and code nostalgia

A session of link hopping caused me to hunt down a program I wrote for the Amiga in 1994. I didn’t really think I would be able to locate it, but once again, I underestimated the power of the Internet.

Not only did I find it but Aminet, the entire archive where I published it, is actually online!. The software is an accounting program called Banker which featured a fairly complex user interface. I was actually using a GUI toolkit called MUI (Magic User Interface) which was extremely impressive for its time. It featured complex widgets with support for a lot of listeners, on the fly reloading of resources and skins, localization, etc…

The only problem with MUI is that it was a bit ahead of its time processor-wise, so user interfaces written with it tended to be a bit sluggish. But it was totally worth it.

Back to Banker, I realized while browsing its entry on Aminet that the archive contained its source, so I suddenly became very eager to see the kind of code that I was writing sixteen years ago. The archive is a .lha, another format that was popular on the Amiga, and for which I was quickly able to find a decompressor running on Mac called DropUnLha.

I was bracing myself, expecting the worst, but… well, it’s actually not that bad. I uploaded the whole project to github.com for posterity, and here is one of the sources. Check out this cute comment ASCII art at the top of the file, neat, uh?

                                       

My only regret is that I wasn’t able to come up with any screen shot of Banker, even in this review of my program from a German magazine, so I would need to run the the Amiga emulator to really see what it looked like.

How about you, dear readers: what’s the oldest piece of code you’ve been able to dig up?