What world-changing programs that just didn't change the world have you tried to write as a newbie?

Question

A recent answer on the topic of compression reminded me of something I did when just getting into the world of computers and programming:

I had found out that in QBasic, a long uses 4 bytes of memory, as does a single (float). However, a long can only take on about four billion different values, while a single can have magnitudes of 10³⁸. I wondered why nobody had ever noticed this, and got on implementing the best compression scheme of all times by building a large number out of several longs and storing this number in a single single. I could even apply this compression several times, and each time the data would be compressed by a constant (and pretty large) factor. I was so smart.

Needless to say, my data came out quite corrupted after uncompressing it again.

So I'm wondering: Are there any similar stories out there? What great ideas have you tried to implement as a newbie in the worlds of bits and bytes and statements, because you didn't know better, only to later find out that the idea was total crap, and it is almost embarassing to think back to it?

Answer 1

I tried to use an open source neural network library to predict the stock market. After testing the program for hours at a time and consistently getting about 80% prediction accuracy, I decided it was time to put my money to work.

Oops.

It turned out the way I was selecting training/testing data, it was very easy to "predict" the testing data because it had already trained on future information. Once I got that straightened out, the program was essentially a very slow random number generator. Luckily I only lost about $50 (after being down $500 at one point) plus some extra time filling out tax forms. Fairly cheap as tuition goes.

Answer 2

i tryed to clone MS-DOS on an Amiga 500 with AMIGABasic. Unfortunately i ran out of memory shortly before completion ...

Answer 3

Years ago, I wrote a program in Basic on my Atari 800 to calculate my taxes. Unfortunately, I put it into an infinite loop and the output was

You owe =
You owe =
You owe =
You owe =
You owe =
etc

Answer 4

I wrote a program on my Commodore 64 once that was [really] going to change the world. Not like any of your silly little attempts but a [real] world changer.

Reality set in the next morning when I'd sobered up and the program wouldn't compile let alone run. There was heaps of code, though nothing you could call Basic or anything else I've seen since.

Strange because the night before it ran like a dream even if I was too drunk to remember how to save to disk or tape.