Blast from the Past

Around 1993-1994 (when I was 13), in school we went from a typewriter machine to the educational workhorse COMPIS computer to a 486 PC within a year. One nice thing about the 486 was that it ran DOOM – the pinnacle at the time of what gaming had to offer. But that is not the main point here, but rather the nice thing was that it included MS-DOS and QuickBasic – the at the time ubiquitous programming language for PC’s. This is where we spend quite some time fiddling with our first lines of code for artistic purposes and just to illustrate what it actually looked like, here is a remake of what that code would produce. Now, in hindsight this means that while the young minds at ID Software did some actually cool stuff in programming, I was still exploring and studying basic concepts such as how to output colours and randomization.