When asked if he’s bitter for receiving no compensation for creating Solitaire for Windows, Wes Cherry once quipped, “Yeah, especially since you are all probably paid to play it!”

The origin story of Microsoft Solitaire, the silent killer of countless hours of office productivity around the world, was recently put in the spotlight in Reddit’s Today I Learned community, when Cherry showed up in a thread about himself. His appearance brought out fans nostalgic for the days of clicking Start > Programs> Accessories > Games to land upon that comforting green screen, where they could waste away company time.

Here are some facts about Microsoft Solitaire from its creator:

Cherry wrote the game as a college intern.

I wrote it for Windows 2.1 in my own time while an intern at Microsoft during the summer of 1988. I had played a similar solitaire game on the Mac instead of studying for finals at college and wanted a version for myself on Windows.

He was told he wouldn’t get paid for it, and was cool with that.

The code is nothing great…the only slightly interesting thing is the optimizations I did to get card dragging to work smoothly. Back in those days getting a pixel onto the EGA buffer took getting out a hammer and chisel and chipping away at the silicon for an eternity. Object oriented programming was a newish thing back then and there wasn’t a C++ compiler available for windows, so it has a goofy message passing architecture to get polymorphism and inheritance. At the time there was an internal “company within a company” called Bogus software. It was really just a server where bunch of guys having fun hacking Windows to learn about the API tossed their games. A program manager on the Windows team saw it and decided to include it in Windows 3.0. It was made clear that they wouldn’t pay me other than supplying me with an IBM XT to fix some bugs during the school year – I was perfectly fine with it and I am to this day.

Well, he did earn something.

A few people have paid me “a penny” as a joke. I’d get them in the mail, or in person if someone introduced me as the author of Solitaire and the obligatory no royalties conversation came up. I think I’m up to about 8 cents now.

His original version included a “boss-key,” which when pressed, would display a programming code. Microsoft made him remove that.

There’s a cheat in the version he created.

“When playing Draw Three, you can hold down Ctrl-Shift-Alt and click on the deck to get one card. That makes most games winnable,” he told B3ta.

He prefers the “beach scene” deck of cards.

He also wrote a version of Pipe Dream for Microsoft, and was paid “a few thousand bucks in stock” for that.

Cherry now owns and runs Dragon’s Head Cider, an apple cider producer on Vashon Island, west of Seattle.

See the original Reddit thread here.