Preserving History

Computer programming is an art, more than anything, with its own culture and history. For the last few years, I've been working to document an era of computing that is, bit by bit, disappearing before our eyes. For example, how many people would still understand why the Windows 1.0 hello.c example is so long?

Sure, writing a GUI app is never easy, but how often can you say that you have to work day to day with segments, near and far pointers, or even cooperative multitasking? The 16-bit era of computing by and large predates the concepts of free and open source computing as a mainstream idea, and examples, let alone actual living specimen are very few and far between.

Most of my work is either on YouTube or on the Restless Systems wiki, but I do write and commit code here that I write in the course of my projects, as well random other tidbits from time to time here.

Who Am I?

I'm NCommander, sometimes known as the Restless Yankee, or Michael if we're speaking formally. I'm a 34 year old freelancer, who, due to life's twists and turns, ended up a content creator documenting lost and disappearing history.

Over the pandemic, I got into documenting the Windows 1.0 Hello World program, and from there, I've made a career out of it. Unfortunately, YouTube ad revenue doesn't pay that much, so I find myself having to expand and diversify my income. The funds I raise first go to ensure I can continue to work on these sorts of projects by covering basic life expenses such as food, gas, and more.

After that, anything left over is dedicated to buying tools, equipment, or even just boxed pieces of history to document, explore, and write up.

How Can You Help?

If you've got a legacy or vintage code base you'd like documented, or preserved, get in touch. Very little in terms of source code from the early eras of computing has survived, and every little bit helps fill in more cracks in history. Sometimes, just exploring and writing up an item such as OS/2 1.0 can help answer some major question

On a more basic sense though, it helps a lot in just letting me do what I do. Right now, I'm only supported on the revenue that comes in via ads, and Patreon. This is good for a content creator, but is somewhat irregular, and doesn't provide a way to directly work with me, or have me involved in a project. For every small example here, there are often many hours that aren't seen, so every little bit truly makes an enomorius difference.