useless.exe
Back in the 1990s there was this Danish meme program called “useless” (aka. “useless.exe”) that was being circulated on floppy disks and on the internet. About a year ago I spent an unreasonable amount of time trying to dig it up and, through hundreds of now-forgotten web searches and endless scouring of ancient forum posts full of dead links and disappointment, I eventually succeeded, so I figured I’d make it available here for others in the same situation to find.
History
The program was originally developed by Jimmy Dan Christensen (and, to some extent, Carsten Graff) some time in the early/mid 1990s and licensed as Public Domain. Here’s the “about” box from the actual program:
Other than that, there’s a tiny amount of additional info available here: https://web.archive.org/web/19970724234624/http://www.forum.dk/sw/useless/
Getting and running it
The easiest way to get it up and running on modern hardware is by installing VirtualBox and then importing this Win 3.1-based appliance I made for running it. This will boot into MSDOS where you’ll need to type win and hit Enter to start Windows 3.1. From there you can execute Useless from the ‘Games’ program group.
The harder way is by downloading useless.exe and an old Visual Basic runtime, like VBRun300.dll, dump them in the same directory on an older Windows machine/VM and hope that it’ll actually work when you double click on the EXE file.
Either way, have fun!