Hello, World — A blast to the Past
I’ve always loved trying out older operating systems, and I love experimenting with them. After some experimenting with Windows 98 SE, I decided I would post a little “introduction to programming in Visual C++ 5.0”.
It’s a simple “hello world” console application, which I, for some reason, struggled a little bit with at first. Both Windows 98 SE and Visual Studio 97 can be downloaded from WinWorldPC.com, which is a great resource for ‘abandonware’ as they call it.
After you’ve gotten both Windows 98 and Visual Studio set up, fire up Visual Studio from Start → Programs → Microsoft Visual C++ 5.0 → Microsoft Visual Studio 5.0.
Unless you’re actually on an old machine with Windows 98, the splash screen should flash for a split second before Visual Studio is up and running (so it’s more of a “flash screen” 🙃).
On the first screen of Visual Studio, there should be a whole lot of gray in middle of it, some docs on the side and filled-up toolbar on the top of the screen. Go ahead and pick File → New… to create a new project. We’ll just create an easy example, so we’re going with “Win32 Console Application”. Remember to give the project a name, it doesn’t really matter what you name it.
When you’ve named your project and clicked “OK”, an empty project should appear, with no source files or anything of particular usefulness. I guess I’m used to IDEs nowadays that spoon-feed you with initial project source files. But once again go to File → New… and create a “C++ Source File” and name it whatever you feel is fitting.
Now there should be a blank window sitting on your desktop titled “<name of file>.cpp” and this is, of course, where we write our source code. Write source code according to the picture below.
After finishing up the code, go to Build → Execute <project name>.exe and you should be greeted with your very own “Hello, world!”
This should get you kickstarted on all of your Windows 98 coding needs! In 1997, when Visual C++ 5.0 came out, I was just turning 2. I did not have the fortunate opportunity to learn C++ at that time and some slight trouble getting started. So this is for those that would like to try out something different and don’t really know how to get started.
