When I got my first IBM-compatible PC back in 1994 (486DX2-66, 8MB RAM, 540MB HDD), I started off by programming in QuickBASIC, but soon moved to pure assembler. This period is characterized by numerous, mostly simple, DOS programs and utilities written completely in x86 assembler and compiled with Turbo Assembler. Great deal of them represent some sort of hacking effort, be it hardware or OS hacking and tweaking. There are also many graphics attempts, although not too attractive.

Majority of programs in this period were compiled to form a *.COM excutable, due to simpler design. There were also a couple of simple Visual Basic (version 3.0 for Windows 3.1 and 95) applications.

The one project I'm most proud of is launching of a Bulletin Board System (BBS) 'server' called SonicBBS back in 1995., which was written completely in assembler. As it was growing, it featured almost everything what other good BBSes were featuring; offline message reading and writing (QWK packages), online games (remember Legend Of the Red Dragon, LORD?), network conferences and automatic message exchanging with other BBSes, and so on.

But it gained popularity with features and quirks other boards just couldn't provide, as they were all being driven on more-or-less the same or very similar BBS dedicated software. There was a feature for launching a connected user to the DOS prompt. It was like you are inside DOS (or DOS window) on your own computer, except you were acctually connected to SonicBBS'es DOS prompt and browsing a disk dedicated especially for SonicBBS purposes. To prevent misuse, I disabled some functions like deleting files or formatting drive by hooking to DOS API interrupts and intercepting certain calls.
Also there was a feature to see the current air temperature at the location of my house. I designed a little device which was connected to a sound card's game port (provided for connecting a joystick), and by which SonicBBS could calculate current air temperature at the outdoors. Also, there was no censorship on SonicBBS (except removing really bad insults and similar stuff, or making them private-only), and no time limit for connection duration of any kind was present.

SonicBBS went offline sometime during 1999 I think. Internet took #1 spot as an online medium for communication and fun. At that time, SonicBBS'es source code was over 600kB large, and contained over 20'000 lines of code.

*** Under construction ***

One day back in the 1987 my father came home, took something out of the car, and handed it over to me. It was ZX Spectrum power supply adapter. 'What is this?' I asked. 'A computer' he said. And for the rest of the day I thought that this weird black cube thingy was a computer, and asked myself how can one do anything with this? Computers are useless! Later I saw the real ZX Spectrum, then I realized that I've been fooled around... But, soon after that, I took complete control over it... Buahaha!

You'll need some Spectrum emulator to run this proggys, for example Spectaculator (http://spectaculator.com/), or some other. You may also try with a real Spectrum if you still have one! :)