I found one of my first programs (Java, 2011) on the Wayback Machine and it runs

One of the first programs I ever wrote - a program to find valid English crossword fills given a grid pattern with optional partial completions.

This project came to mind recently and I looked around on the Wayback Machine. Turns out I posted the jar on MediaFire and linked to it on an old blog on Jan 2, 2011. Luckily, there was [_one capture_ of the jar on MediaFire](https://web.archive.org/web/20240123154949/https://download1...) from oddly recently (Jan 23 2024). I downloaded and opened it on my 2023 MacBook Air, and it ran! Since it's Java, I'm guessing it runs on other computers, too :)

It was a delight to find it still working. Anyone else ever find an old program you thought you lost and get it running again?

The first major piece of code that I ever wrote was a publishing workflow management system for a major newspaper. It routed page images to presses and generated pdfs of each page in each edition of the newspaper and made pdfs of each day's newspaper editions and published them to a static website where they were archived.

I was only allowed to use perl 4 to write this software and I wasn't allowed to use a database, even though the datastructure for a day's publishing batch had tens of thousands of keys and values and required RDBMs style queries. It also features a configurable postscript parser that extracts all kinds of data from completed newspaper pages that informs the publishing system. When I wrote it I was told that it would run for a few months only while we figured out how to get a $5M commercial product to handle the work.

The whole thing was written in perl 4 style OO Perl and came in at about 16k lines of code in the end -- most of the code was for the postscript processor and tons of cruft that I had to write to made a relational DBMS in memory because I wasn't allowed to use mysql. It took me four months to write it. I launched it in January of 2002 and it runs to this day. I know this because I got a call about it last month where my replacement's replacement's replacement asked me a few questions about what OO Perl is because he wanted to make a few changes. Good luck! It still runs and is responsbile for about 80% of what it was originally built to do. It is used by hundreds of people daily, who by all reports absolutely hate it. There are people working at the newspaper today that use it regularly that were not born when I wrote it. I am twice as old as I was when I wrote it.

They have apparently tried to replace it several times over the last 22 years and have failed to do so... this is likely due to the blockheadedness of my old boss (who is still there) as much as the radically insane obscurity of my code, which is exactly how you'd expect 16k lines of 22 year old OO Perl 4 would be.

The wayback machine is pure nostalgia. Every time I go there I’m truly amazed at what it’s like to have a society wide memory that automatically captures these different moments of our lives.

Old pictures I never thought I’d ever see again. Landing pages for old companies I’ve built and only a handful of my closest friends remember. Blog posts from long deleted places, times, and mental caverns.

Just incredible.

This is cool. I went there to check if I can find some of mine and found the page that links to some of my public downloads, unfortunately, none of the Zip files were archived.

And the Ruffle Flash Emulator still do not work with most interactive Flash Applications!

My son found some of my old java code from 20 years ago and managed to get a couple of the programs to run, with some very minor modifications. The java applets not so much, because no browser has had support for applets for a decade or so.