This was my first ever publication. Wilf Hey, writer of the Programmers’ Workshop column in PC Plus, had run a contest to write what we’d now call a quine, but which he described as a “self‑creating program”, one that tells you what it does by producing its own source.
By coincidence, I had just been experimenting with PKZIP’s ability to create self‑extracting EXE files. ZIP archives fused with the decompressor into a single executable. It occurred to me that if I took a few liberties with the definition of “programming language”, I could use that mechanism to produce a rather cheeky entry.
I wrote a batch file that performed the trick, copied it onto a 3.5‑inch floppy, and posted it off.
When the issue finally came out, I was thrilled to see my name in print! I proudly showed it to all my friends in the sixth‑form lounge. But I also winced a little. I hadn’t given any thought to “source code” and he quite rightly pointed out that I wasn’t the author of PKZIP. At the time, I’d simply bundled PKZIP.EXE itself as the “source” because I needed something to be the source code and that seemed good enough. A quite inconsequential decision at the time.
After reading his comment, I started working on a revised version that included a small text file to act as the actual source. But I stopped. He wasn’t going to publish the same joke again!
Decades later, having lost my copy, I resolved to find it again. I only remembered that it must have been during my sixth-form years because I remembered the sixth-form lounge where I was showing the magazine around at school. That gave me a rough window but not the exact issue.
I got close when I discovered that archive.org had scans of Programmers’ Workshop from around that period. I found the edition that announced the quine contest, which gave me a lower bound, but none of the twenty or so scanned issues contained my entry. Still, at least I now knew which ones it wasn’t in.
Armed with the eight remaining issue dates, I posted on various retro‑computing forums to see if anyone might have a copy. A few people were selling old issues on eBay, but I wasn’t keen on paying for a one‑in‑eight chance.
What finally bore fruit was posting on Hacker News. A very helpful man, Paul Robinson, offered to go to the British Library, which holds archive copies of every issue of PC Plus, including the eight I was hunting for.
Paul’s trip to the British Library finally closed the loop. After decades of half‑memories and dead ends, there it was. My first published line of code‑adjacent mischief. Reading it again, I could see both the charm and the flaw. I’d tried to be clever, and succeeded — just not in the way the contest intended. In hindsight, the headline fits better than ever. I wasn’t just making a self‑creating program. I was being, in every sense, too clever by half.
Many thanks to archive.org, The British Library, Hacker News and Paul Robinson.
Oh yes, and congratulations to PKWare for inadvertantly writing my entry to the contest.