{"id":13226,"date":"2016-01-08T17:32:41","date_gmt":"2016-01-08T22:32:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/?p=13226"},"modified":"2016-01-08T17:32:41","modified_gmt":"2016-01-08T22:32:41","slug":"microsoft-solitaire-was-developed-by-a-summer-intern","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2016\/01\/08\/microsoft-solitaire-was-developed-by-a-summer-intern\/","title":{"rendered":"Microsoft Solitaire Was Developed by a Summer Intern"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.reddit.com\/r\/todayilearned\/comments\/3zfadv\/til_that_microsoft_solitaire_was_developed_by_a\/\">Wes Cherry<\/a> (via <a href=\"https:\/\/news.ycombinator.com\/item?id=10841658\">Hacker News<\/a>):<\/p>\n<blockquote cite=\"https:\/\/www.reddit.com\/r\/todayilearned\/comments\/3zfadv\/til_that_microsoft_solitaire_was_developed_by_a\/\"><p>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.<\/p><p>The code is nothing great&#8230;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.<\/p><p>Object oriented programming was a newish thing back then and there wasn&rsquo;t a C++ compiler available for windows, so it has a goofy message passing architecture to get polymorphism and inheritance.<\/p><p>At the time there was an internal &ldquo;company within a company&rdquo; 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&rsquo;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.<\/p><\/blockquote>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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&#8230;the only [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"apple_news_api_created_at":"","apple_news_api_id":"","apple_news_api_modified_at":"","apple_news_api_revision":"","apple_news_api_share_url":"","apple_news_coverimage":0,"apple_news_coverimage_caption":"","apple_news_is_hidden":false,"apple_news_is_paid":false,"apple_news_is_preview":false,"apple_news_is_sponsored":false,"apple_news_maturity_rating":"","apple_news_metadata":"\"\"","apple_news_pullquote":"","apple_news_pullquote_position":"","apple_news_slug":"","apple_news_sections":"\"\"","apple_news_suppress_video_url":false,"apple_news_use_image_component":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[418,295,37,138,219],"class_list":["post-13226","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology","tag-game","tag-history","tag-microsoft","tag-optimization","tag-windows"],"apple_news_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13226","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13226"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13226\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13227,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13226\/revisions\/13227"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13226"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13226"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13226"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}