Fortune

Barely a program. Fortune opened a small gray window, showed you one of twenty-eight quotes, and sized itself to fit whatever it had picked. Double-click and it gave you another. That’s the whole thing.

The quotes live in FORTUNE.TXT, a 2,639-byte file with each entry wrapped in curly braces. Yes kids, this is pre-XML and pre-JSON. The program counted the opening braces to learn how many quotes it had, picked one at random, and copied everything up to the closing brace, expanding tabs to eight spaces — which is what indents the attributions. Reading that code back is like finding a note in your own handwriting explaining something you no longer remember deciding.

What survived is more interesting than the program. Twenty-eight things two guys in 1992 thought were worth keeping:

Tell me, I’ll forget; Show me, I may remember; Invlove me, I’ll understand.

— Chinese Proverb

Kant on how much science a discipline contains. Augustus De Morgan on fleas having smaller fleas. “If it weren’t for the last minute, nothing would ever get done.” Several attributed to Unknown, which in 1992 meant somebody read it somewhere and wrote it down.

That misspelled Invlove above has been in the file since September 1992. It’s still there in the browser version. Fixing it felt like correcting someone’s handwriting in a letter they’d already sent, so I left it.

Fortune and Concentration share a date and a company, and both still have their source code — which Combat Tanks , the one anybody actually played, does not. The web version reads that same 1992 text file, unedited.

Open it in your browser — the original file, the original typo.