1990 Christmas Letter

The very first Christmas letter was written in the C programming language. I believe I printed the source code and mailed it to the victims. I must have…the only other choice at the time would have been to write it to a floppy and mail it. But none of them had PCs. Then again, even if they had PCs, the chances they would have had a C compiler would have been quite slim.

I was a Computer Science student at the time and had just finished a semester in C. I was going to continue the cleverness with one written in Cobol the following year. But the response to this one was so underwhelming I decided not to. Besides, Borland did not produce a version of “Turbo-Cobol”…at least not that I was aware of.

The source code is reproduced below. The quality isn’t the best as it was printed on my trusty Oki ML80 dot matrix printer with an old ribbon and one of the pins in the print head wouldn’t always fire.

Sorry I don’t have a soft copy of it any more so please don’t bother to ask me to send it to you. You’ll just have to enter it in by hand if you want to see it in action.

(click on an image to enlarge)

Click here for PDF version