That was how I learned to program, back in the 90s when I was a teenager.

But it was never what I meant to do. I was quite sure I was going to be a game developer. Knowing absolutely nothing about designing a game, managing a project, et cetera, I just starting writing games at the beginning, with a splash screen or animation, and then started writing the start GUI for the game.

For a 13 year old pushing the boundary of what you could do with QBasic and mode 13h graphics, I never quite got past designing the GUI, but I made a heck of a lot of them.

>Because this site still gets a lot of traffic, I'll be redesigning the site with more of a modern look and feel. [...] I'll try to keep you posted and hopefully won't get sidetracked.

Looks like they did get sidetracked, and I'm glad! If the author is reading this, I think it's a great time capsule that's probably best left as-is.

Another time capsule, this time in the form of an endolink: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38938998

DOS-based GUIs were the rage in its days.

In 1999 I coded a graphical environment for DOS using Borland's BGI in Turbo Pascal. I even used it in one of my uni assignments[0].

I still remember some afternoons in the library, helping pals with linked lists basics and finetuning my textbox scroll code. Good times.

[0] https://github.com/luismedel/jugadores

edit: Forgot to add that I wrote a lot of code in paper :-)

GIMI was quite impressive as well, also including its own programming language, but also getting some heavy-lifting weight from a handful of tools written in other languages: https://sourceforge.net/projects/gimi/

Fascinating. I wish I could run them in a browser VM - it would probably be pretty fast as well.

This is absolutely amazing! It brings back great memories of my childhood when I was doing similar mock UIs in QBasic, then QuickBasic, Turbo Pascal and Turbo C. Thanks for sharing!