John Sobanski:

This year I cleaned out ancient drawers from my childhood bedroom and found a floppy disk from 1986. […]

Today I will revisit my old code. Keep in mind, a fourth grader wrote these programs back in 1986. I have not run them in nearly forty years.

A truly delightful reminiscence. I love how a 9-year-old’s humor shines through.

Even though I started programming in 1981 or so, my earliest computer files would also date to around ’85 or ’86, after I got my first computer. I was nearly a decade older than Sobanski, so I’d moved on from doodling and sophomoric humor. Those files still sit on floppy disks in a box somewhere—one day I’ll go through the exercise of retrieving (or perhaps recovering) them. I’d love to learn what my 16-year-old self was thinking.

And, as every story these days must legally reference AI, Sobanski ends by asking Grok to recreate his childhood artwork—to which I can honestly say: Grok has the talent of a precocious nine-year-old.

(Via @a2_4am → @amoroso@oldbytes.space.)