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Comment by hrayr | Hacker News Reader

One of my fondest memories in learning to program as a kid in the late 90s, was writing windows 98 UI clone in QBasic.

I would screenshot the start menu, buttons, window borders, and various other UI components and try to recreate them in QBasic by zooming in and inspecting all the pixels.

I had subroutines to create windows, buttons, menues, various fonts, 255 colors and mouse support. It was coming together incredibly well given I had no idea how any of these were built. I had a working version of minesweeper and a text editor.

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> One of my fondest memories in learning to program as a kid in the late 90s, was writing windows 98 UI clone in QBasic.

I did the same although trying to create a Unix GUI (in a purely visual “I’ve seen this in the movies” sense) and I did it in Amos Basic.

Needless to say it wasn’t a great success, but it provided me with the foundation for a making couple of neat-looking applications which actually did useful things (to me).

It was slow as heck, but I had great fun doing it.

That's funny, I did the exact same thing, although I didn't make it as far as you. I had a working mouse cursor (reading the mouse data directly from the serial port) and buttons. At that age, I didn't know about subroutines and had gotos all over the place.

It was a common rite of passage at the time. I did something very similar, first cloning Borland's TUI, then Win3.1.

The nice thing about Windows of that era - its widgets and their default color scheme was designed to still work with just the original 16 EGA colors (since that was the baseline for video cards back then). To be even more precise, everything other than window title and selection was done in 4 colors - white, black, and two shades of gray. Window/selection added a fifth. Things like selection rectangles and resizable window borders were done using XOR. This all was readily accessible in a DOS app, pretty much regardless of the language.

Did you build a gui toolkit or just hard-code everything? I remember creating a GUI paint program in Turbo Pascal (the only language I could get my mouse to work in) and I quickly got over my head as I didn't abstract anything out

It was abstracted out, but I don't know if it qualified as a GUI. I had subroutines for creating the various components and placing them anywhere on the screen. I don't remember how I handled the events. One of my biggest regrets is loosing all my work around that time.

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