My first paid programming job was making a client for a remote monitoring solution for the water industry. I must have been 14 or 15. One of my father's acquaintances knew I had been messing around with programming, and he needed a shiny Windows 95 application for his customers.
It would dial the plant via modem, and I remember being given a list of "escape codes" that determined how the stream of bytes should be rendered on the screen. My program parsed (some of) these codes and displayed the text accordingly, I specifically remember implementing the "move cursor" and "reverse mode" codes...
Not until years after did I realise I had basically built a shitty terminal emulator using Visual Basic text fields.
It would dial the plant via modem, and I remember being given a list of "escape codes" that determined how the stream of bytes should be rendered on the screen. My program parsed (some of) these codes and displayed the text accordingly, I specifically remember implementing the "move cursor" and "reverse mode" codes...
Not until years after did I realise I had basically built a shitty terminal emulator using Visual Basic text fields.