Something That Was Cool

So I came across this question on Quora, and wanted to write an answer for it. But the answer I had in mind, was neither far back to qualify as the past, nor did it answer the second part of the question (triviality). However nobody does it these days, or so I think.
This was in the summer of 2010 when I was learning C programming. It was a crash course and our lab had only Turbo C++ compilers. We used to have lectures where syntax was explained and we used to try them out in labs. To explain the concept of loops, we were explained with an example program which printed different triangles and quadrilaterals. Discussion after hours led to a clever combination of using clrscr(), setxy() and rand() function in combination with mod to create so called screensavers, in the form of marquees, shapes that appeared in a random fashion. It was cool then. For people who were just learning to program.