I joined the Stack Overflow community a few days ago and this question came up today:

What is the strangest/weirdest program you’ve ever made?

I didn’t have to think long before I knew my answer, which I’d like to share with you now.

My father was in radio communications on submarines in the British Royal Navy when he was younger. He’s in his mid 60s now, but about 10 years ago he came across a defense job opening with ASIO (the Australian spy agency) keeping tabs on the radio chatter coming out of Indonesia. This was pre-Bali Bombing, so maybe ASIO knew something was going on back then.

I wrote a Pascal application that converted text strings into Morse code and played it out the PC speaker so he could check his Morse abilities. He could also use the spacebar as an input to “send” messages.

He didn’t end up applying for the job, but he got a chance to show off his skills to us kids. He was proud that I could program the computer to talk Morse; I was proud of him for talking Morse without a computer.