Oh man, I wish I am able to look at code I wrote today, 23 years later. It's like going to your parents house and picking out toys you played with when you were 5 years old. Might seem like a silly thing to do when you're 15, but priceless when you're 30.
I recently recovered code that I wrote 23 years ago in middle school. It was for an Apple II BBS we ran for a little while.
To read source code (and BBS messages) that you wrote in 1989 as a kid is quite a surreal experience, to say the least.
I got the code running, too, thanks to an email I wrote to a friend on said BBS describing in detail how to edit the code (using the AppleWorks word processor), recompile the code, and operate the BBS from the console. Without that 23-year-old email there's no way I would have ever figured it out.
I recently found a 1.44" floppy with my first serious game, written in, ahem,
Visual Basic. Neverless it still runs and is actually very playable and fun!
Now I wish I knew better then to shove it in a cardboard box and forget about
it for so many years. I could have made some serious $$$ from it.
The worst part was reading the source code and realising that, despite being
written in Visual Basic, the alghoritms are actually smarter and better than
something I wrote very recently.
"With great system resources comes a great carelessness about ones performance"
Last month I found, in an old box, a listing of the first computer game I wrote back in 1975. I thought that had been lost forever. I'm going to try and scan it & OCR it.