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

The smaller the userbase, the more likely the code is to remain in service forever. The oldest code I've written is http://www3.amherst.edu/~scrutiny/about.php, which has gotten a facelift since I wrote it in 2004, but otherwise seems to have the same functionality and code backing it.

Pretty much everything professional is gone...hell, the only employer of mine that is still in business is Google. When I left them in 2014, about 3% of the code I'd written for them was still in production, and following the rule above, it's silly stuff that nobody ever sees, like https://www.google.com/search?q=deubogpiegpj&tbs=qdr:h (that's the no-results page when a tool is selected).

I am not sure if they are still running, but some time ago I wrote a large number of Oracle PL/SQL procedures activated by cron jobs. The source database schema did not change very much ( JIRA ) and those procedures ran for at least four years without needing any attention or maintenance.

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

Pretty sure code I wrote in 2001 right out of college is still used in production for mission critical systems for a national association.

My socket library from 1997 is still handling thousands of sessions a day. I just checked the CVS log, and it has only had 2 minor changes since 2005.

Code to analyze results from the Slowpoke nuclear reactor at the university of Toronto: 1994.

Extranet for Very Large Company, circa 1999. X0,000s of users, X0,000,000s of docs.

Platform: Lotus Notes / Domino.

I've got some code in part of a corporate-scale backup system that I wrote in 2008 (right out of college). The product is being put into kind of a permanent maintenance mode, so I imagine that the same code will be there for as long as anyone's using the product.

I had a hand-coded Geocities page (actually, 2 of them) in about 1995 and 1996. Should still be accessible in the Archive, or something.

The code I wrote in my first job is probably still used, but I don't remember any features I worked on.

The code I wrote that will be running the longest is code I've contribute to Emacs. User-facing features are unlikely to be removed anytime soon.

Written ~2004, still used by over ~5k ppl. Even had an intern steal the idea and create a startup.

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.

Written in 1997, still in use at a few banks that haven't upgraded, well, since the 90s

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.

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).

I started a Mac app in 1988; the same code base (with tons of people touching it since I last saw it in 1994) is still a real product for sale today. No idea why.

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.

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!

Some municipalities in São Paulo state in Brazil are controlling their budget using a Dataflex 2 application I helped write in 1990 and 1991. I realized that the application still runs because of a presentation about the ongoing effort to migrate it to Python.

Sadly, the educational applications for Apple IIs I wrote in the mid 80's are no longer in use.

In 1999, I created the r_waterripple variable in Quakeforge which has propagated to most subsequent Quake ports. The implementation may or may not vary, but all projects seem to have carried the variable name. I also contributed pk3 unpacking and resurrected the Solaris port, either of which may have code circulating.

Also between 1999 and 2001, I was involved in the LiViD project where I worked on a port to PowerPC. I don't recall any patches actually landing into LiViD because it turned out that the bug was in GCC itself, a bug I was told must have existed since the mid-eighties. I didn't directly write the GCC patch, but did debug the compiler error and worked with the GCC team on the fix. This directly resulted in a port of Xine to PowerPC. (LiViD and Xine are early projects for multimedia and DVD playback on Linux) Xine exists today, but it's unlikely any of my code is in it. While the GCC fix is not my code, the fix itself still endures and exists because of my interaction with the project.

It's a newer example, but code I wrote simply as a demo for the Cairo graphics project back in 2004 became integrated into Tuxpaint and is still used today for rasterizing SVG graphics into stamps.

Back in 2000 I went to work for a company named Voice Data Solutions in Raleigh NC. We got on the e-payments bandwagon and created a site called ccpaymentservice.com that allowed you to pay things like water bills, utility inspection fees, etc. online (a lot of our existing customers were municipal governments and the like). I've been gone a long time, but looking at the site, not much seems to have changed, and I suspect that at least a few lines of code that I wrote between 2000-2004 are still in use there.

One bit that I hope is gone is the ONC RPC stuff I wrote for talking to the credit card processing engine we were using back then. That was pretty ugly. It was my first programming job, I'd never done RPC before, and I hacked up something pretty kludgy to make it all work. Not my proudest moment. :-(

https://ccpaymentservice.com

xlogo 1989

2000. VB6. Manufacturing workflow / management system, BOM..... I did some consulting work at the same company a year ago and that system was still chugging along. They had pretty much rewritten / replaced everything else around the place but apparently didn't see a need to change my module. I was amused to have a couple of guys come and ask me questions/advice, and all I could do was sympathize.

1998. Lotus Formula Language Runtime engine. Completely rewrote the original written by Ray Ozzie. GA released in 1999 in Lotus Notes/Domino R5.

1988. A specialized finite element analysis program. Fortran.