In 1980, while working at Texas Instruments, I wrote a program to draw mazes one night. My first version started out quite simple and elegant, but the mazes it printed (on our departments line printer) weren't very difficult to solve. The next night I improved the mazes produced by the program, adding tweaks here and there in the code to make the mazes harder to solve. I added long winding dead ends, corridors with loops and so forth. The mazes caught on and soon many cubicles had the three page mazes with hand drawn solutions as decoration. Marketing folks headed to a trade show saw these mazes and wanted the program to run on a system on the trade show floor so that personalized mazes could be handed out as trade show swag.
Unfortunately, version two of program wasn't very pretty with all the little hacks and tweaks, but it did make fun mazes. Six or nine months later I got a call from someone wanting help with a Pascal program (I was one of the Pascal experts in the company at the time so I would get calls like this). As they described the program on the phone, I recognized it as my maze program. They said they got it off of the distribution tape for the TI Pascal compiler (I had programmed the program in Pascal). I was mortified that someone had made the ugly program a sample program for a TI product but at least it didn't have my name on it!
Unfortunately, version two of program wasn't very pretty with all the little hacks and tweaks, but it did make fun mazes. Six or nine months later I got a call from someone wanting help with a Pascal program (I was one of the Pascal experts in the company at the time so I would get calls like this). As they described the program on the phone, I recognized it as my maze program. They said they got it off of the distribution tape for the TI Pascal compiler (I had programmed the program in Pascal). I was mortified that someone had made the ugly program a sample program for a TI product but at least it didn't have my name on it!