Anatomy of a C Program

STalky, written in Heat-and-Serve C

In 1992 and 1993, I was using C for a lot of college assignments. I also had many C compilers for my trusty Atari Mega STe.

About this time I was selling a shareware program that let you schedule the download of emails, message board posts, and file downloads. As a companion to that I decided to create a small program to work as a “type-ahead” buffer for when you were actually online.

STalky running on my Mega STe

Keep in mind that being online back then meant you were paying by the hour for a service and also possibly for the phone call itself. Things are cheap today!

I called this program STalky (as a play on the name STalker, which was the programmable terminal software I used) and decided I would write it in C to keep it as small as I could. Here’s a pic of the first page of the source code:

First page of STalky source code. Full source code and more information about how it was made continues in the rest of the article for paid subscribers.

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