As a hobby, I like to search my family name in Google. Hope if I’m lucky enough, I may found my relatives that I never know before. But the only name that I can found so far (which is not my own name) is my elder sister name 😛

Anyway, today I found a program that I used to wrote a long long time ago. It is Smile Font Editor.

It use for editing a bitmap font in textmode (DOS). I think the way it works is changing a font mapping, probably in BIOS. In the same package, there’s a font loader for load the modified font into computer’s memoery as well. The font loader’s original code was from Microcomputer magazine (Thai), using inline assembly in Turbo Pascal. For the editor, I wrote most of it myself (very proud at that time), entirely in Turbo Pascal.

Used to ran a BBS, called Smile Site, for a month, I was eventually named most of the programs I wrote at that time like “Smile ..(something)..”. (I think I chose this name in the first place because at that time the name of a popular radio program that I was listened to everyday is Smile Radio).

Besides the font editor, there’re Smile Reader FX (a text viewer which can interprets special tags into colors, tables, pretty printing stuffs), Smile BBS List (Thailand’s BBS list/phonebook app), an abbreviation lookup app (some sort of dictionary), etc. Most of them were done in Turbo Pascal, few of them in Clipper.

Unfortunately, I have lost all of them already, all gone with my old harddisk.
Although I can find some binaries on the Internet, but the source code is forever gone. May be this is one of the reasons why I’m very into “open source” 😛

Hmm… Yeah… Getting old now… 😛

P.S.
If you actually downloaded any of those mentioned packages, and read its README or FILE_ID.DIZ you may find a word “[SDG]“. It stands for Siam Developers Gang.

Mainly, the group is me and Manrat Chobchuen. Manrat, a sysop of Zigma-X BBS at that time, will later the author of SiamSurfer++ web browser.

I never met him, physically, until two years ago in an open source event at BITEC Bangna (I went there together with another two Sun Thailand staffs, for a talk on Pladao Office and also open source software in general. Dr. Virach was a moderator of that talk. I think some of TLWG guys were also there as well.), after that day we never have a chance to meet each other again.

Old man talks old stories…