Aside from the obvious "Hello World" kind of examples, I started off making text adventures and other text-mode games in the late 80's.
I remember one that was a text adventure called "The Quest of Sir Edwin" or something equally awful where you had to lead this knight to recover a magic item that would save the king. Another one was an absolutely terrible wrestling role-playing game (all in ANSI graphics) where you chose one of the 4 or 5 made up wrestlers and had them fight turn-based matches on their quest to win the belt. I even had an easter egg in that one where you could hit a particular key during character selection and be able to play as a secret character who had all the best moves of the other guys.
I used to share them with my friends, so there's probably some copies floating around somewhere on old 5 1/4" disks.
I did find a copy of one of my slightly later creations on the archive of some BBS. It was a DOS fortune telling program from around 1992. It can be found here - http://jhanson.com/software/fortuneteller.html
I remember one that was a text adventure called "The Quest of Sir Edwin" or something equally awful where you had to lead this knight to recover a magic item that would save the king. Another one was an absolutely terrible wrestling role-playing game (all in ANSI graphics) where you chose one of the 4 or 5 made up wrestlers and had them fight turn-based matches on their quest to win the belt. I even had an easter egg in that one where you could hit a particular key during character selection and be able to play as a secret character who had all the best moves of the other guys.
I used to share them with my friends, so there's probably some copies floating around somewhere on old 5 1/4" disks.
I did find a copy of one of my slightly later creations on the archive of some BBS. It was a DOS fortune telling program from around 1992. It can be found here - http://jhanson.com/software/fortuneteller.html