In college I was a bit lazy. In order to not do work during the school year, I tried to do it during the summer instead. The result of my laziness was the first game of Solitaire on the Internet. It was so popular that at 500 hits per day it became the most popular site in the entire Computer Science department.

In today’s world 500 hits per day is nothing. Web servers today can handle that many simultaneous connections and more. But back in the late 90’s 500 hits per day made a site popular. I remember being asked by the school to remove the site. The reason: A professor’s site wasn’t in the top 10 any more.

CS410 was a programming course. The prior year the students were tasked with creating a Java applet game. So, knowing that the professor was going to be the same for my class, I decided to do the homework over the summer. Same me from having to do it during the class year making my life just a little bit better. So, I spent the summer learning Java. Unfortunately for me, the professor changed at the last minute and it became a class teaching us Perl.

So, I was left with just a popular applet. It won an editor’s choice award from bonus.com and was added to some children’s sites.

The applet itself is very simple. The mobile device shortcuts such as touching a card and it doing the right thing aren’t there. No ads, no pre-determined winning hands. The shuffle algorithm randomizes the deck and then performs an actual shuffle for a random number of times. The cards were drawn by a friend of mine, Gloria Chin.

Unfortunately I can’t find the source for the game. All I have now are the class files and gif’s.

Please note: You’re going to have to adjust your java security settings to get this to work.