myrita

Most of you probably know what a word search puzzle is. It's one of these guys:

But there's also another kind of puzzle that most people overlook but that follows logically, and it's one of these:

I first learned about word search puzzles when I was about 5 years old. It was probably the most common busy work we were given in school when they wanted to keep "teaching" us about a subject but didn't have any more actual work for us to do. One of my clearest early memories in school was doing one of these puzzles about the history of Rome, and just how crushingly boring the whole thing was.

Anyway, I was never very good at those, but I was very good at computers, and computers at the time had Windows 3.11 and a tons of cheap software that we could buy at the local Radio Shack for $5 or less.

One of the pieces of software that piqued my interest and that I asked my parents to buy me was Wordsearch Mania! (with a mandatory exclamation point). As already mentioned, I didn't particularly like word search puzzles, but I really loved creating custom things for my friends and family. And this promised to let me do just that.

After the novelty of making custom word search puzzles for my friends wore off (including printing them out on my Canon Bubblejet BJC-250 printer), I noticed that I could also make number puzzles:

I thought these were kind of silly, but I printed a few off as sort of a joke. Most people I shared them with found them irritating. But... my babysitter at the time (yes, I was a small derg at the time) absolutely loved them, and asked me to print off loads of them for her to do to pass the time while she was over.

Fast forward about 15 years, and I'm in college, putting off an incredibly crucial assignment, and I decide to check up on my old babysitter. I give her a call and find out that she still loves number puzzles, but that she's mostly doing Sudoku now because she can't find any number searches like I used to make her.

I got a little bit confused about this, because, surely, these must be available anywhere and at a dime a dozen, right?

Well, at the time (about 2010), I couldn't find number search puzzles anywhere. I looked in book stores, in puzzle/game stores, in those little gift kiosks that take over malls during the Christmas shopping season, and of course, everywhere online. And I couldn't find even a hint about number search puzzles even existing. Was it possible that Wordsearch Mania! was the only real source of these puzzles at this time?

So, I did what any reasonable person faced with crushing school deadlines would do, and I spun up a copy of Windows 3.11 in a virtual machine, found my old Wordsearch Mania! CD, and got to work.

I used an application included with Windows 3.11 called Recorder that people from the era may recall:

If you don't know, Recorder is a program that lets you record and play back macros, and a macro is some series of actions that can be repeated. So it basically lets you record some action on the computer and play it back over and over and over. It can make tedious, repetitious work rather easy.

With a bit of trial and error, I made my macro do the following things using Wordsearch Mania:

1. Build a new number puzzle with a numbered file name (starting at PUZ1.WSP), having the number increment 1 for each puzzle created.
2. After the puzzle was built and saved, that puzzle would be opened.
3. After the puzzle was opened, that puzzle would be printed to a virtual PostScript printer which would output onto my (at the time) Windows 7 machine.
4. The puzzle would be closed, and we'd go back to step 1.

I let this run for about a day and got over 6,000 number puzzles out of it.

The next step was to convert my virtual PostScript file to PDF, but this was pretty trivial to do with an old copy of Adobe Distiller that I owned. I opened the file in a beefy text editor and cut the number of 'printed' puzzles down to about 400, and then ran it through Adobe Distiller. This gave me a PDF of 400 puzzles.

I then sent these 400 puzzles to a professional copy shop where they were printed and bound up and mailed to me. I then wrote a little note inside the book and shipped it off to my old babysitter. She absolutely adored it, and it took only about two years to get through all the puzzles before she returned to Sudoku.

Fast forward another 10 years, and it's now approximately The Present. I'm telling this story to a friend, and I get to the part of the story where these types of puzzles just don't exist, and I decide to search again. Lo and behold, I find out that they do exist now, and they're plentiful and cheap... and also kinda super poor quality and not something I want to send my old babysitter.

So I fire up the ol' VM from 2010, and decide to have another crack at the puzzles.

My macro still works flawlessly and I let it run through another 400 puzzles, then output them to a virtual printer again, then run them through Adobe Distiller again, then send them off to the printers again.

I don't have any photos of the original book from 2010, but here's a peek at volume 2 that I just received in the mail today:

My former babysitter is nearing 90 years old now, but apparently, her mind is still sharp as a tack. So I'm hoping this present is going to make her day when I ship it out to her next week. :3

Anyway, that's the story. I hope you enjoyed the bit of effort I put into this. I also thought you'd find it neat that I used a Windows 3.11 application, because when I did this the first time in 2010, there weren't any other applications that did the same thing — they were all for word search puzzles only! I really love solving modern problems with old software (and old hardware, where applicable), so this was just a delight to run through, and I hope you liked it, too.

Here's a bit of extra detail that you might want to know if you're a nerd, or interested in doing this sort of thing yourself:

I have Wordsearch Mania! version 1.11 (yes, that's the original copy I bought from Radio Shack in 1994), but you can get version 1.13 from the Internet Archive if you want: https://archive.org/details/WSRCH113. There also seems to be a version 2.01 available as part of a larger software collection, too: https://archive.org/details/pcwoct97. I plan on archiving version 1.11 on the Internet Archive when I get a few extra minutes within the next month or two.