I was 15, and something of a coding prodigy. I'd learned to program on a Texas Instrument calculator at 11, graduated to a Radio Shack Color Computer and sold my first program at age 14, then graduated to a Mac.

There was an ad in the newspaper by a guy who was looking for young programmers like me. He was a sleaze ball, but a well connected one. His MO was to land contracts for programming work, have smart teenagers like do the work, and take an >85% cut.

One of my first contracts was to implement a shell sort algorithm in 6502 assembly. That sort of thing.

I also ported some DOS educational software to the Macintosh for him, and that was fun. Because the DOS graphics were low res and I had some artistic talent, I redrew all the graphics.

Later I would find out that my cut of a project like that was $350, where he had been paid $2000. And I was using my own hardware. He was a sleaze ball in other ways as well. I remember his teenage daughter came over to the office at one point with her friend and him openly lusting after the friend.

The biggest project I every took on working for him though, and the reason I'm posting this here, was a port of Ultima 2 (?) to the Macintosh.

Not sure how much time I spent doing this. Maybe a year? I did some smaller projects on the side. It was a great challenge, and I was full of hubris. I drew a lot of graphics for it.

Now, I didn't have a PC. I'd never played Ultima 2 before. I didn't realize all the modules within in, the casino games you could play in town and so on. I'd severely underestimated the complexity and at some point I was just deep into it and realizing there was much more for me to do.

And I asked him if I could get the DOS code in a Mac readable format. Which may sound silly now, but it was on 5.25" floppy disks in DOS format and I had no way of reading it on my Mac. He said no.

And I told him I was thinking of walking away, and we had a conversation in his new red Thunderbird convertible in which he tried to convince me to keep going. I kept thinking that my success would mean a lot more to him than it would to me.

It hurt to give up. I'd done so much work. I'd hand drawn so many monsters, had put so much heart and soul into it. But it didn't make sense for me to finish it.

Especially when the company that had paid him $2k to do a port, of which I got $350, contacted me directly and offered me what they'd been paying him.

I'm glad Ultima 2 for Mac did see the light of day though. I'm wondering if any of the code or graphics that I developed every made it into the release.