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BrandonRead this or your mom will die.
My web-site was recently hacked and it got me to thinking of the past. Its been about 4 years since I started QBASIC, my dad taught me the basics and I made simple menus and programs. Something happened one day that changed things, I found X-GUI 3, made in QBASIC but it could do so much. I couldn't do graphics yet, but I tested as many GUIs as I could get my hands on. During easter break 2005 I read a graphics tutorial and made a simple GUI I called "Fun500 GUI" and released a version "2005" and "2005 Bronze" with little improvements. For a while I did nothing then in May 2005 I again updated the system and released "2005 Silver". But I had a problem, I still couldn't get mouse code to work. The forum at the time was jacobpalm.dk and the membership mainly was Jacob, Steve, Todd, Kyle, and I if my memory is correct. I remember Todd as being very outgoing and I talked to him on Google Talk once in a while. Jacob and Kyle were "big kids" who really didn't socialize outside of the forum. Steve was like me, new to QBASIC. One day someone mentioned the answer to my problem, the QBASIC /L switch, I had a mouse, so Fun500 GUI 1.0 had a mouse and a design with a side bar. I thought I was ready for a scripting GUI so I set out to make one and this was a long process over which I met many interesting people. Pharaoh wanted to get low level and had a lot of old hardware, ysft was still young and tried his best, MPNQB had a lot of new ideas and knew how to make something look cool, QBGV and me had a conflict that ended with him leaving and calling me a druggy, Mystikshadows had a new revolutionary idea and was like a wizard, there was someone called Brenden who got in a fight over his fake brother Delta and never really made a GUI, I'm sure there was more people but I can't remember them all. 2006 went by and I didn't really make anything other than some demos. By the Summer of 2007 I was getting sick of nothing so I made a kind of enhanced 1.0 in FreeBASIC that I called 2007 and 2007 Gold, both were decent but didn't multitask in any way. Then one day looking though my old 2 demos I saw one was pretty good and that I could make a working scripter and that 2007 wasn't the best I could do so I sat down and 2.0 came, it was my dream a GUI with a scripter, made by my hands. But to go even farther I added a skin system and user system that I first made for 2007 and called it 3. The dream wasn't complete, because no one saw 2 or 3, Jacob had closed his site, because it was a bunch of php files held together with duck tape and he didn't have time anymore. Todd and a new guy Murray used it and so did Kyle. Then came Summer 2008, the blog really had died and so had all GUIs, so I guess I a pretty jerk thing and told Todd I was talking his site. I ditched the blog software and installed a massive CMS with a forum, something Jacobpalm.dk had, that really was needed. And between me and Todd we posted enough to get other people tired of hearing us to join in! Jason a young, defiantly blonde kid finally came out and started talking more, Kyle came back, a new kid Aguma showed to much talent for his age and a lot of the old guys stopped in, Jacob, Mystikshadows, ysft, MPNQB and Pharaoh. The community was looking like its old self, so I bought a domain to make it all seem more permanent and here I am today, running the BASIC GUI Headquarters of the world. PS: My memory isn't perfect.		2008-09-287:53 PM
ToddRe:Read this or your mom will die.
Wow, that's a mouthful! lol ;) Yeah I remember the days with JacobPalm.dk and people like Steve and QBGV. Brendan wasn't much of a QBer but he and I talked on GT once in a while. He doesn't live far from MPN which is why he joined. Jacob also had those Half-Life 2 comics and cow drawings on his website. It made the site somewhat interesting since it wasn't strictly QB all the time.		2008-09-288:13 PM
jasonwoodlandRe:Read this or your mom will die.
Woah what a long journey it took! I have a feeling that some of the stuff you said was in with my history as well, such as How you developed Menus and then made some with a mouse and how It all built up. :) Thanks for sharing Brandon!		2008-09-288:15 PM
BrandonRe:Read this or your mom will die.
I talked to Brenden also. I remember thoughs comics. My linux distro DCL original stood for Dead Cow Linux. Dead Cow like the comic of Jacob's hehe.		2008-09-288:16 PM
Re:Read this or your mom will die.
What happened with QBVG? he seemed like a good person.		2008-09-2810:02 PM
ToddRe:Read this or your mom will die.
Not really sure. He just disappeared a while back in 2005, I think. He was working on OFOS (Old-Fashioned Operating System) at the time.		2008-09-2810:06 PM
jasonwoodlandRe:Read this or your mom will die.
OFOS? Ain't that a copy of something like... Fun500 back in 2005?		2008-09-294:22 AM
ToddRe:Read this or your mom will die.
OFOS was like Fun500 GUI in 2005 but different. Have a look at the reviews to see what I mean.		2008-09-296:59 AM
ksrRe:Read this or your mom will die.
Ah, the memories! For me, my relationship with BASIC started at the local amateur radio club. I was bored and going through the contents of one of their many DOS machines. I found this executable, QBASIC.EXE, which looked like EDIT.COM but I was told could run commands. I tried "echo Hello" but it didn't work. Someone then said "I think it's PRINT", to which I probably replied "but I want it on the screen, not on paper!". After that I used to lurk the neozones/NeoBASIC forum for a while, and although I rarely posted I felt like I knew the guys on there pretty well. It was from there I found mrchrome's famous GUI review site (sadly gone, like so my QB sites on hypermart).I downloaded them all and this is where I really got into GUIs. From there I was quite active on qbasicnews.com (when it was good). I remember when FreeBASIC was just released. Earlier that year, one of the traditional April fool's posts on neozones was along the lines of "A fast QBASIC compiler for Windows, with DLL and DirectX support!" And then came the whole QB/FB "war", which was pretty sad, but nothing really new (there was the whole "pure QB vs. libraries" thing before that). Then I somehow found jacobpalm.dk, which was a really rocking place in its heyday. Everyone seemed really productive, but the excuses for putting out a new version were usually along the lines of "version 0.05b build 53 revision 2a(ii): I commented the source and made you wait 10 seconds while it pretends to load" :D Do you remember those little images that we had, with information about the status of all our GUIs? Brandon, you make a lot of quality stuff, but I think if you concentrated all your efforts on a single flavour of Fun500, with all of the features, it would be even more impressive.		2008-09-2912:31 PM
BrandonRe:Read this or your mom will die.
Single flavor? What do you mean? QBGV left after me and him argued lol.		2008-09-291:51 PM
ksrRe:Read this or your mom will die.
Well, I put version at first, but flavour seems more appropriate, because (it seems to me) there are so many different GUIs under the Fun500 name.		2008-09-292:33 PM
BrandonRe:Read this or your mom will die.
I used the same name for all the different branches, each time I learned something new/better it became the new Fun500.		2008-09-294:26 PM

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