About nine months ago, John Sobanski — chief knowledge engineer at data analytics company Craxel — stumbled across his Apple II floppy disks from 1986. After recovering eight Applesoft BASIC programs he’d written at the age of nine, he shared the source code on his blog. The unique programs demonstrate how a young developer played with and learned concepts such as strings and input.
90 HOME
100 PRINT "MILES"
110 INPUT M
120 PRINT "SPEED"
130 INPUT S
140 LET T = M / S
150 PRINT "HOURS: ";TSobanski ran the programs for the first time in nearly forty years, captured their output, then fed the source code into a large language model, instructing the LLM to produce refinements to his original code — specifically, the programs that generated graphic output. Here is a comparison of his original low-res lion with the one AI “improved” by adding ears, making the mouth more symmetrical, and coloring it at random:
Sobanski concludes:
Today’s exercise provided me with novelty and nostalgia. I had brief, subtle recollections of nearly forty-year-old memories. I got to see my first attempt at iterative loops, computer graphics, user input, and string concatenation. I also got a peek into my weird, slightly obnoxious nine-year-old sense of humor.
My Childhood Apple II Computer Programs (1986)
Although Sobanski’s programs aren’t lost artifacts and don’t unlock any missing era of Apple II history, they are a personal glimpse of the kind of juvenilia many of us likely engaged in when personal computers were new, inspiring exciting new ways of thinking and problem-solving. How many more of us started with such basic, playful experiments, then continued to push the technological envelope for decades to come?
It all started with the Apple II.
(Hat tip to Adafruit Industries)