Bugs lurking in code paths that aren't used often.

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Style Pass

2021-05-18 08:38:56

As a result of being cooped up in the house for this extended period, I've been doing a lot of random tidying on my computers. I have years and years of accumulated cruft lined up along with a few things which are vintage and neat. The trick is finding out which is which and throwing out the useless stuff.

Part of this has involved digging through the debris left over from old projects. One of those projects was from around 2003 or 2004, when I rigged up a really ugly parallel port connection to an old Commodore 1541 floppy drive. This was not one of my originals, but rather a drive I had purchased explicitly for the purpose of "saving" my old disks.

It's probably a good thing that I did it then, back when the disks were "only" 15 or so years old, instead of waiting much later. I doubt many of them would still be readable now that another 15 years have passed, in other words.

Anyway, as I went digging through an "unsorted" directory the other night, I came across a pair of disk images from a truly ancient project I had done once upon a time. While I don't remember my motivations any more, at some point I decided I needed to write a bulletin board system (BBS) so people could connect to my computer to send and receive messages and trade files. There were a bunch of existing systems, but for some reason I had gotten this notion in my head that I needed to write one.