The first website I got paid to make is still up. Not exactly responsive, but this some of the first code I ever got paid to write.
Ask HN: Oldest code you have written that is still in use?
331–340 of 363 posts
Re: Ask HN: Oldest code you have written that is still in use?
#332Earlier quoted context omitted.
Cool stuff. You are the same person that built a OS X file access filtering app but didn't publish it, right? I think you were considering open sourcing it, any news on that?
I did publish it, but it didn't sell well, because our marketing sucked. I'd give you the source code if you asked for it I think. I don't think it's really worth open sourcing at this point, I doubt there's much interest in it.
Thanks, that would be nice. I have my e-mail address in my profile.
Re: Ask HN: Oldest code you have written that is still in use?
#333-D flag in OpenSSH.
Re: Ask HN: Oldest code you have written that is still in use?
#334Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd be curious to know how many of these programs/scripts/etc. have easter eggs hidden in them. It seems like you're the only one to mention it so far.
Have you played the pinball game in Word 97? Or the flight simulator in Excel 97?
Holy smokes I had no idea those existed. That's way cool; thanks for the heads up.
Re: Ask HN: Oldest code you have written that is still in use?
#335Earlier quoted context omitted.
According to Wolfram Alpha [1], it's 9953280000000000000, which is 10 quintillion! :O [1] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=1e7+*+10+*+60+*+60+*+3...
Whoops, off by 30!
According to Wolfram Alpha [1], 30! is 2.65e32
;)
Re: Ask HN: Oldest code you have written that is still in use?
#336Back in maybe 1991, I wrote a reimplementation of cpio to backup a secure version Unix and preserve sensitivity labels. Supposedly, there are still a couple of systems running in the bowels of some 3-letter agency or other.
But that's nothing. I did some contracting for one of the big airlines in the late 80s. They were running an IBM system called TPF for the reservation systems. One of the guys I worked with was a systems programmer and he was pretty proud that that code he's written in the 70s was still running. Scary thing is, they're still running much of that code today, just on new hardware.
Re: Ask HN: Oldest code you have written that is still in use?
#337Earlier quoted context omitted.
Cool stuff. You are the same person that built a OS X file access filtering app but didn't publish it, right? I think you were considering open sourcing it, any news on that?
I did publish it, but it didn't sell well, because our marketing sucked. I'd give you the source code if you asked for it I think. I don't think it's really worth open sourcing at this point, I doubt there's much interest in it.
Open source is always well received. Also, there are people out there running GNUStep/Darwin!
Re: Ask HN: Oldest code you have written that is still in use?
#338https://msdn.microsoft.com/ UX/DB/Webservices ;)
Re: Ask HN: Oldest code you have written that is still in use?
#339I wrote a distributor/manufacturing system in 1988 that is still in use in 2 companies; domain model still valid 28 years later, though the programming language used is way out of style now
Re: Ask HN: Oldest code you have written that is still in use?
#340Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I posit if you want to make sure your code survives you, write video game code. I dunno, firmware seems like a pretty safe bet too. I wrote seek algorithm firmware for Quantum's Atlas series of SCSI disk drives in the late 1990s, I suspect there are still a few of those spinning out there somewhere.
I wrote seek algorithm firmware for Quantum's Atlas series of SCSI disk drives Are you aware of anything at all like that which is opensource/published? This sounds like something that could be fascinating to read.
Unfortunately, no I don't. :(
Our lead servo engineer (and a lot of people in the industry) were strongly influenced by Franklin, Powell, and Workman's book "Digital Control of Dynamic Systems," and IIRC there's a chapter devoted to disk drive control systems in it.
I worked a bit on the seek algorithms, but I also worked on the repeatable-runout cancellation system, which was actually a lot cooler to work on but less interesting to most people. It basically did Fourier Transforms to compute "predictable" errors staying over the track caused by things like disk shift or "potato chipping" of the disks. That error could then be injected back into the voice-coil motor to help keep the heads in the right place.
It was all written in a very low level assembly language on a custom ASIC we designed in-house with no floating point arithmetic. :) That was almost 20 years ago at the very beginning of my career and it's still some of the coolest code I've ever written. :-/