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In the late 1980s I had a set of 3.5″ floppy disks which contained some games like Sleuth, Centipede, Space War, and Sopwith. Also present was a program that I think was called "weasel", which was not really a game at all, but a simulation of generating the phrase "Methinks it is like a weasel". I think it had an orange/yellow/red color scheme.

Is this program available anywhere now?

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  • I remember playing with this (having read Dawkins' book) and I don't think I wrote my own version of the algorithm. It was probably on a computer magazine cover disk/CD in the UK when Dawkins' book was popular. I've no idea where to find it now.
    – alephzero
    Jun 30, 2021 at 19:00
  • country? possible magazine? date range? I remember Sopwith (1984) hitting several early magazine disks. Dawkins program was demonstrated on television in 1987, which may have spurred development of the program you used
    – scruss
    Jul 1, 2021 at 16:21
  • @scruss: UK, late 80s or possibly early 90s. The disks didn’t come from magazines, but were passed to me from a family friend, with hand-written labels. The programs may have been copied off a magazine at some point though.
    – jl6
    Jul 1, 2021 at 18:03

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According to the wiki page, Dawkins wrote the program in BASIC, then rewrote in Pascal, but there was no mention of the platform or the OS.

You may want to browse through the Rosettacode selection. There is a Pascal version, but no Basic version specific for MS DOS.

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  • 14
    The "loss" of Dawkins' original AppleSoft BASIC source code has been a matter for much noise in the anti-evolutionary scene (it exists, unfortunately) as it "proves" that Dawkins rigged the code to make it look like evolution is real ... I wish I could make this up.
    – scruss
    Jul 1, 2021 at 16:10

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