Microsoft Solitaire Was Developed by a Summer Intern
Wes Cherry (via Hacker News):
I wrote it for Windows 2.1 in my own time while an intern at Microsoft during the summer of 1988. I had played a similar solitaire game on the Mac instead of studying for finals at college and wanted a version for myself on Windows.
The code is nothing great…the only slightly interesting thing is the optimizations I did to get card dragging to work smoothly. Back in those days getting a pixel onto the EGA buffer took getting out a hammer and chisel and chipping away at the silicon for an eternity.
Object oriented programming was a newish thing back then and there wasn’t a C++ compiler available for windows, so it has a goofy message passing architecture to get polymorphism and inheritance.
At the time there was an internal “company within a company” called Bogus software. It was really just a server where bunch of guys having fun hacking Windows to learn about the API tossed their games. A program manager on the Windows team saw it and decided to include it in Windows 3.0. It was made clear that they wouldn’t pay me other than supplying me with an IBM XT to fix some bugs during the school year - I was perfectly fine with it and I am to this day.
