nostalgia

I recovered another program I wrote in 1995: ELPDS, or Enhanced Logical & Physical Drive Status. Run ELPDS C: and it reports physical disk geometry, partition entries, FAT b...

In 1998 I needed to convert PDF files to text for a search engine called Alkaline, without requiring separately installed libraries. So I wrote a C++ parser. Alkaline is another...

In 1997 I wrote UcsLink.Fusion for the University of Geneva. We had hundreds of PCs across the city, Sun and Windows NT servers, and Windows 95 and Linux workstations. Getting a...

In January 1998, a classmate and I wrote a game. It was called “Bolongas zBalls”, and it was a Java applet.

In July 1998, the Internet Society held INET ‘98, “The Internet Summit”, at Palexpo in Geneva. The University of Geneva provided about 250 computers for the conference, and I wa...

In the 1990s I wrote a document manager for a small business in Geneva with about 20 workstations. Most of its staff were new to computers, and folders were a challenging idea t...

Before GNU Autoconf generated configure scripts, there was a DOS program called Autoconf. It let you keep one CONFIG.SYS and one AUTOEXEC.BAT, then choose among boot configurati...

In his Rails World 2026 keynote DHH talks about one-shot apps built almost instantly with an agent as part of Omarchy. His canonical example is Omacalc, a dead simple calculator...

I’ve rebooted vestris.com and have incorporated it in New York State to serve as a legal entity for my open-source projects, including the many slack bots.

Update, September 2026: I found the original 1991 SVM article, identified and contacted its author, rebuilt both the original and later versions, and reconstructed Autoconf’s hi...

In 1997 I wrote a program called Jade. It worked on Windows 3.1. I can’t get it to run anymore, but I got the image that would hang there until the app loaded – it says Stolen T...

In 2009 I gave away the remainder of my old company’s, Vestris Inc., software. The source code for all of it is also available here.

In the spirt of winding down the rest of Vestris Inc., I’ve published the source code for all of the commercial software.

There was a time when having multiple e-mail accounts was some kind of a pipe dream. Since I had more than one, I had to deal with Eudora that wouldn’t allow me to have more tha...

This was my first commercial product. It has been available for a while with full x86 assembly source code. It’s useful if you still run a DOS system ;)

It’s 2009 and my first company, Vestris Inc., hasn’t existed since 2004. You can read some history here. For the anecdote, this is the actual map of Vestris Inc. customers.

Legend has it that a group of Eastern monks are the keepers of three towers on which sit 64 golden rings. Originally all 64 rings were stacked on one tower with each ring smalle...

The eight queens puzzle is the problem of putting eight chess queens on an 8×8 chessboard such that none of them is able to capture any other using the standard chess queen’s mo...

I wonder whether it still compiles and runs.