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Ask HN: Oldest code you have written that is still in use?

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Re: Ask HN: Oldest code you have written that is still in use?

#13
post #4

Client-side or server-side? My Angelfire website circa 1999 is still up and running :)

I guess my horrible JavaScript for my Geocities page is probably still living on an archive.org server somewhere. Most of that was cut-and-pasted, though, so probably wouldn't really count regardless.

Re: Ask HN: Oldest code you have written that is still in use?

#14
Just perusing all my projects big and small over the past 20 years going back to college and they're all gone up until less than 2 years ago. Every single one. I always say you need to treat these projects like a Tibetan sand painting. Once it's done and perfect, just wipe the slate clean and start over. It's the journey, not the destination.

Re: Ask HN: Oldest code you have written that is still in use?

#16
Roughly a decade. The VB6 program that I wrote to test a prototype of a measurement instrument, is still used in the factory, supporting manufacturing of the released product.

It's a couple thousand lines, and nobody wants to touch it with a ten foot pole, but it also has no known bugs, and will live for the remaining lifetime of the product.

Re: Ask HN: Oldest code you have written that is still in use?

#17
I have the horrific horror (honour?) of knowing that a lot of my code is still live.

The oldest is the internal system for a record label written in 1997 and I still occasionally get emails asking how such and such works (and I have little idea, it was in PERL).

Through to code that processes video and audio snippets for most of the UK Football League premium content sites. Authored in 2000 (mostly VBScripts that slice, encode, and distribute media files and the metadata).

Parts of btinternet.com still appear to use my horrible CMS... written in 1999... though gladly it's now very few parts and I suspect these are just cached outputs rather than the CMS still being in production.

Most worryingly would be the UK Home Office, and most UK banks and some heavy manufacturing companies that I wrote project management reporting software for over a decade ago, and as they manage 20 year projects I believe that stuff has at least another decade in production. At least all of these systems are not internet connected (then again, they'll never be updated either).

My code isn't terrible clever or pretty, those requirements got dropped a long time ago. But I have learned to make code that is simple to read, easy to maintain and tweak, and that can sprintf debug with the best of them (debug tools of choice have come and gone in the time my code has been live).

Re: Ask HN: Oldest code you have written that is still in use?

#19
A system information app I originally wrote for Windows 98, but subsequently added support for NT-class Windows client, still runs and works almost perfectly today (with graceful feature degredation) on Windows 10. I do a tiny amount of work for every new Windows that's released, to support it. Sometimes no work at all. The codebase was originally written in 1998.

Nobody uses it now apart from me, but I still maintain it.

Re: Ask HN: Oldest code you have written that is still in use?

#20
From 1997 thru 1999 I worked on a data management system that is still used in the nuclear industry. Initially VB5 (maybe even VB4, I think) and then moved into VB6. About 150,000 lines of VB code over 2.5 years with two developers working on it - myself and a project manager. One of the first applications that I wrote as part of this system was a 2D, steam generator tube sheet mapping application. Link to the system is here:

http://www.westinghousenuclear.com/Portals/0/operating%20pla...

Screen shots of the tube sheet mapping application are in that PDF. The system was eventually featured in Visual Basic Programmer's Journal in September of 1999. I was 24 at the time and I felt like I had really accomplished something!

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