A pro wrestling simulator in 2003. It's terrible. The code is absolutely horrible. There is a small community of folks that still play it.
Ask HN: Oldest code you have written that is still in use?
101–110 of 363 posts
Re: Ask HN: Oldest code you have written that is still in use?
#102Re: Ask HN: Oldest code you have written that is still in use?
#1032002. Part of a weather forecast tool to determine where to best place salting trucks during winter storms http://inws.wrh.noaa.gov/page/tou
Re: Ask HN: Oldest code you have written that is still in use?
#104Around 1989 I wrote a PC program that replaced an Epson HX20 storing injection molding machine programs on small cassettes. 2000 I got a call the molding machines had been sold and the old IBM PS/2 ditched. The new owner asked me if I still had the program. I re-mounted my old QIC streamer sleeping in a box, installed Borland Turbo Pascal in a DOS box in OS/2 and could recompile it from source. Got the same price as I originally sold it for again ;-). Still in use. The Epson HX20 is gone though...
Re: Ask HN: Oldest code you have written that is still in use?
#105Around 1989 I wrote a PC program that replaced an Epson HX20 storing injection molding machine programs on small cassettes. 2000 I got a call the molding machines had been sold and the old IBM PS/2 ditched. The new owner asked me if I still had the program. I re-mounted my old QIC streamer sleeping in a box, installed Borland Turbo Pascal in a DOS box in OS/2 and could recompile it from source. Got the same price as I originally sold it for again ;-). Still in use. The Epson HX20 is gone though...
Re: Ask HN: Oldest code you have written that is still in use?
#106There's an entire community of video game hackers (smwcentral.net) using a cross-assembler I wrote in 2001 named xkas. I added a few minor patches and by early 2004 I had released the final version, v06.
I never really intended for anyone to use it seriously. I made it for myself, but went ahead and posted it online anyway. It is a 1500-line single-file, nearly-commentless, nearly-spaceless abomination of code with no documentation, and an endless list of critical bugs that every user keeps encountering. They have elaborate workarounds for many of these bugs.
It became a negative feedback loop: "Why do we use xkas? Because everything else is written in xkas", and so now even more code was created and written in xkas. And so even though I've since written a proper assembler that's dozens of times nicer, no one can/will use it.
Lately, people have been writing their own versions (in addition to countless forks) that try to offer backward compatibility with all the crazy parsing errors and (mis)features of xkas, like left-to-right evaluation of math expressions, and the most convoluted macro evaluation system you've ever seen (one user proved it was Turing complete and wrote a Brainfuck parser in it.)
It's surreal. I feel terrible that so many people are stuck with this mess, but even I can't stop it anymore :/
Re: Ask HN: Oldest code you have written that is still in use?
#107People still play the Warcraft III map I made in 2006, mostly in Russia. It relied heavily on an extension of the scripting language called vJass created by a genius eastern european hacker named Vexorian and was one of the most advanced of its type for a while. It was also ported to the DotA 2 engine, where it has millions (!) of subscribers.
Come on... Say all that and not mention the name of the map? Is this 'petrosianshina', the clone of 'Vampirism Fire'?
Being russian I can only name this as something with millions of subscribers and is not dota.
Re: Ask HN: Oldest code you have written that is still in use?
#108I wrote a fax->email gateway in 2002 that's still in very active use.. wouldn't be that remarkable, except most of the servers are still running original equipment with original hard drives! Anyone have servers running 24x7 with hard drives older that that?
Yup. Have a few Sun SPARC boxes from the 90s. Just one of those things, including the disk array enclosures, takes up half a rack.
Re: Ask HN: Oldest code you have written that is still in use?
#109Occasionally, users of a piece of $10 shareware I haven't updated since 2005 email me demanding a refund because this software they bought 10+ years ago has stopped working on El Capitan. I refund their money because it's not even worth my time to argue with them. http://www.chimpsoftware.com/irooster/
Wow, do they have any legal leverage (as in, sue you for 10$) to get their money back in this situation? I would just ignore them, or if point to the relevant point of license agreement and/or law (if there is such point/law).
Dunno. Probably not. But it's not worth the time or energy to deal with them beyond giving them back their two lattes worth of money.
Re: Ask HN: Oldest code you have written that is still in use?
#110My "personal" website that I made when I was a kid at 2001. I think that I uploaded it to the Geocities free hosting and soon forgot about it. Then a few years back when I googled my name I stumbled upon it haha It is still up after more than 15 years on god know which free hosting and server, it was so funny. And of course it is used as a joke now by my friends :) And of course I have forgot my credentials long long ago (even if I knew where to login in the first place).
http://dzigi.itgo.com http://dzigi.itgo.com/o_autoru.htm <--about me page with my pic as a kid haha