Sure it’s fall, but spring cleaning can happen anytime and Windows power users know this all too well. I wipe and reinstall Windows twice a year since it has a habit of accumulating garbage. I’ve been doing this for many years, since Windows 3.1, so I don’t find it that big of an inconvenience. I keep my computer lean and clean, and as such, I almost wasn’t going to do a wipe ‘n’ reinstall. But it’s been sometime and I felt it was due.
While waiting for all of my backed up project files to be copied over to their original locations, I was rummaging around in the drawer of my computer desk and came across a 3.5″ floppy diskette labeled ‘Chris – OAC’; it was a disk of homework from my OAC year in highschool. As an aside for those not from Ontario or familiar with OAC, it was also known as Grade 13 (it was mandatory for students planning to go to university). I fired up a Windows Explorer window and browsed the diskette for a walk down memory lane. I found homework assignments for Physics, Biology, Chemistry and English. But what really caught my attention was a directory on the diskette called ‘Golf’. It contained a file called ‘Handicap.bas’ with a last-modifed date of ‘Wednesday, March 1, 1995, 4:33:04 PM’. “What the hell is this? [CRICKETS CHIRPING] Oh…yeah, that’s it.”
It was a program that Sean Claire and I wrote after hours at the Hollinger Golf Club. I’d say the work was divvied 70/30 in Sean’s favour; he had a Mechanical Engineering degree and more programming exposure. I was high school student who had just applied to the pharamacy programs at U of T (not accepted), University of Saskatchewan (accepted), Dalhousie (not accepted), Memorial University of Newfoundland (accepted), and of course LSSU (accepted…obviously). But we managed to write something in QBasic to determine a golfer’s handicap on a 486 33MHz Compaq Presario. It was later replaced by a province-wide networked system on that same Presario machine. For the curious, take a look at Handicap.bas’s source code; it’s a tad ugly 😉
