Internet archives are amazing and under-appreciated.

I searched a #Usenet archive for a program I’d written decades ago in high school: an interpreter for the Karel programming language for use in intro CS classes. Because wonderful people have maintained those archives for many years, I was able to find my program 40 years after I wrote it. https://www.usenetarchives.com/view.php?id=net.sources&mid=PDI5OUBzcG9jay5VVUNQPg

It’s hard to describe what it’s like to see that #C code again now. (Although I’m frankly appalled that teenage me didn’t put curly braces around one-line if clauses and for loops.)

I downloaded the source and was delighted that the ancient #Unix shell script to extract the code still runs just fine in bash. (It would take much more time to actually get the program itself to work again.) I posted the source on GitHub: https://github.com/JanMiksovsky/karel.

40 years from now, which is more likely to still exist: the USENET archive version, or the GitHub version? 🤔 I’m betting the former.