How old are you and what's your oldest code online? - Edmond
======
lutusp
I'm 68. Here's a Wikipedia article about one of my better-known programs:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Writer](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Writer)

Here's one of my programs that has been available online for 17 years:

[http://arachnoid.com/arachnophilia/index.php](http://arachnoid.com/arachnophilia/index.php)

Here's an online article about some programs I wrote in the early 1970s,
before Apple Writer:

[http://arachnoid.com/programmable_calculators/index.html](http://arachnoid.com/programmable_calculators/index.html)

And here's a program I updated this afternoon:

[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.arachnoid....](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.arachnoid.sshelper)

All my programs are free and open-source.

Here's an old article about me:

[http://www.atariarchives.org/deli/cottage_computer_programmi...](http://www.atariarchives.org/deli/cottage_computer_programming.php)

------
RNeff
I'm really old. During 1973-5, I worked at Hewlett Packard's Advanced Product
Division in Cupertino. I programmed the HP-21 and HP-25 Pocket Scientific
Calculators. The chip architecture was bit serial with 14 decimal digits (56
bits). The HP-21 had 1024 by 10 bits of ROM, the HP-25 had 2046 by 10 bits.
The HP-25 was user programmable, storing keystrokes, some strokes merged.
There were 49 locations. The original assembly microcode was on punched cards,
and debugged with an hardware emulator attached to an HP-2100 mini computer. I
still have the paper listings. Some years ago, I gave copies to Eric Smith,
who scanned, OCR'ed, and very carefully proof read and debugged the result.
The listing for the HP-25 is at [http://www.jacques-
laporte.org/Woodstock/images/hp25.txt](http://www.jacques-
laporte.org/Woodstock/images/hp25.txt)

Here is a scan of a handwritten program for the MIT Whirlwind, from 1953 (from
Don Knuth's collection):
[http://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/text/Knuth_Don_...](http://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/text/Knuth_Don_X4100/PDF_index/k-3-pdf/k-3-u2774-Whirlwind-
program.pdf)

~~~
babawere
nice one

------
wrs
I'm 46. The oldest thing I can find online is from 1987. (I totally forgot I
wrote it.)

[http://stuff.mit.edu/afs/sipb/project/coda/src/coda/coda-
src...](http://stuff.mit.edu/afs/sipb/project/coda/src/coda/coda-
src/fail/tvclient.c) (and various other files in that directory)

Sorry it's a bit boring, but the "online" requirement kind of skews the
answers, doesn't it? Should I upload some more-interesting older code so it
can be online too? :)

~~~
Edmond
haha..anything you can link to is good.

------
Macha
I'm 20. I wrote this when I was 15 or 16, put it on GH when I was 16:
[https://github.com/Macha/Machat/commits/master](https://github.com/Macha/Machat/commits/master)
. Basically an IM system. It wasn't very good, it worked at some point but I
don't recall if it was working as I left it.

Most stuff on that GH account is pretty terrible, I stopped using it a few
years ago so it's mostly a reminder of "Remember when you were bad at this?".
I have one under my actual name nowadays which has stuff in a more
professional state, but is still pretty disorganised.

Previously there was a school website I created when I was 14, but that got
replaced with something in the last year or so.

------
weinzierl
37, when I was 13 I wrote an equation solver for the C64. It was a simple
program, but had a nice GUI and a catchy name: Determinator.

I sent it to a German computer magazine and they paid me 200 bucks. It was the
first money I earned with programing and it made me really proud.

Almost a quarter of a century I accidentally found that Determinator is still
alive:
[http://plus4world.powweb.com/news/710](http://plus4world.powweb.com/news/710)

~~~
huhtenberg
It _is_ an absolutely awesome name :)

------
maaarghk
I'm 21 - this project:
[http://sourceforge.net/projects/chatspot/files/](http://sourceforge.net/projects/chatspot/files/)
was last released in Dec 2005. So I guess I was 14. I guess there are older
versions on there from when I was 13.

The best part about this horrible, -horrible- code is that it was actually a
vast improvement over the codebase it was built upon.

I think you get a CVE advisory when you google it - not my proudest moment.
But seriously, I am still pretty proud that as a 14 year old that my phpbb mod
ended up installed on some pretty massive forums (my favourite was steve vai's
website, but it isn't live anymore, of course! :p) it solved someone's
problem, at the end of the day.

~~~
michaelmior
That you do [1]. But I would be proud of that! Not many people write side
projects important enough to (a) have someone use it enough to notice a
problem and (b) have it be important enough that a CVE advisory is issued at
all.

I'm sure most people have written code with vulnerabilities over the years.
I'm sure I have. Just most of it isn't worthy of being noticed :)

[1] [http://cve.mitre.org/cgi-
bin/cvename.cgi?name=2005-4529](http://cve.mitre.org/cgi-
bin/cvename.cgi?name=2005-4529)

------
IvyMike
I'm 40.

My Commodore 64 game "Space Caverns 64" was published in Run Magazine in 1986,
and you can get it here: [https://archive.org/stream/run-
magazine-36/Run_Issue_36_1986...](https://archive.org/stream/run-
magazine-36/Run_Issue_36_1986_Dec_djvu.txt)

(Note: there are a bunch of ugly tricks to get the code to fit onto one single
C64 40x25 character screen.)

------
Edmond
OP here.

I am a lurker on HN and often find programming/technical debates that rage
around here amusing.

I am curious what the age distribution and general programming/geeky
background of the HN crowd is. I am going to guess it probably skews younger.

Me:

33

oldest I could think of:

[http://bit.ly/9EKSur](http://bit.ly/9EKSur)

Used to hangout at Slashdot and CodeProject way way back.

------
kenrose
Turning 32 in a month. Oldest code is a JS version of the game "lights" I
wrote when I was 16 (March 30, 1998). I remember writing it the night before
an essay for English class was due because it was way more fun to code. A copy
is still available at:

[http://matuli.free.fr/matthieu/jeux/lights/lights.htm](http://matuli.free.fr/matthieu/jeux/lights/lights.htm)

I thought I was such a 1337 rockstar when I wrote it. Older me thinks it needs
some refactoring.

Older me also wants to tell younger me to stop being such an angsty teenager
and writing whiny dribble about your high school crush in the code's comments.

------
dpw
I'm 38.

If you run Linux on an x86 desktop, you use code that I wrote in 1997: The
MTRR support in
[http://cgit.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/tree/hw/xfree86/os-...](http://cgit.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/tree/hw/xfree86/os-
support/linux/lnx_video.c) (big chunks of that are unchanged in 16 years; I
also collaborated on the kernel-side MTRR support, but that has been rewritten
a couple of times by now).

It's probably possible to find online traces of code I wrote a couple of years
before that. But I think that is the oldest code still in use.

------
ChristianBundy
I'm 21, the oldest code I can find is from when I was 17, written in AutoIt...
some shitty Windows automation language with BASIC-like syntax.

[http://www.autoitscript.com/forum/topic/104814-arrays-in-
aut...](http://www.autoitscript.com/forum/topic/104814-arrays-in-autoit-
confuse-me/#entry741306)

If I remember correctly, this is an auto-adding bot for MySpace, back when I
ran a website for people to add each other and boost their friend count.
Thinking back, I just built a digital orgy for MySpace whores. Cool.

------
jng
I'm turning 40 next week. I think my oldest code online is from '93-'95:
graphic demos and a packet-driver-based program that turned a regular PC with
two network cards into a bridge (saving a lot of money in the process...). All
in x86 assembly language:

"Retarded Vectors" mini-demo ('93)
ftp://ftp.scene.org/pub/mirrors/scenesp.org/compilations/blastersound_bbs/IGUANA/RETVEC01.ZIP

"Yann's 3D" 3D mini-demo ('94)
ftp://ftp.scene.org/pub/mirrors/scenesp.org/compilations/blastersound_bbs/IGUANA/YANNS3D.ZIP

"PktBri packet bridge" ('95) [http://www.jumpjet.info/Application-
Software/DOS/Interfacing...](http://www.jumpjet.info/Application-
Software/DOS/Interfacing/Packet_Bridge/pktbri.zip)

Funnily, someone recently captured videos from the graphical demos and
uploaded them to youtube:

Yanns3D: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cxs-
GnsS1HQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cxs-GnsS1HQ) Retvec:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RBaATafw88g](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RBaATafw88g)
(for some reason this one is missing the shape morphing that was the cool part
of the demo)

------
duncan_bayne
34, and the oldest code of mine online is 11 years old:

[http://sourceforge.net/projects/count/](http://sourceforge.net/projects/count/)

"The count program is a very simple utility that recursively counts the size
of directories, optionally producing a per-directory breakdown of usage."

Ah, nostalgia. There are closed Solaris SPARC specific bugs in the issue
tracker :)

~~~
Edmond
Impressive after all these years still racking up downloads:)

~~~
duncan_bayne
Yeah, I was wondering about that. Spiders / bots / something like that?

~~~
Edmond
no, you'll be surprise it is actually people...I occasionally get the
unexpected email from someone in china asking for help with some of my old
stuff.

------
Namrog84
29 here. Also I think there are a lot of age statistics on hn regulars
somewhere.

I really first started coding in 2009 ever. But I Know I took a few courses in
2002 but never really got into it. As well as a little dabble in mid late 90s.
I was a late bloomer into programming. But now I'm in grad school for computer
science and am doing quite well and absolutely love programming.

------
ah-
I'm 25 now and the oldest things I can still find are little games I built in
DarkBasic.

The best that is still online is probably this game where you had to kick
footballs into a goal with a rc car I made when I was 14:
[http://home.arcor.de/kojotex/Extreme%20RC.rar](http://home.arcor.de/kojotex/Extreme%20RC.rar)
It's about 1000 lines of spaghetti code, at the time I was really proud to
have produced such a huge program.

And it runs out of the box with wine on my laptop so here's a screenshot:
[http://andreas.heider.io/extreme_rc/extreme_rc_3.png](http://andreas.heider.io/extreme_rc/extreme_rc_3.png)

Also, I'm really surprised that arcor.de still hosts these things after eleven
years.

------
hsmyers
63\. C Users Group Extended Precision package. Written on an 8 bit S-100
machine in BDS C (Brain Damage Software, Leor Zolman
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BDS_C](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BDS_C)).
Late 70's early 80's.

------
bennyg
I'm 24. My first try at designing and coding a website, for the game Animal
Crossing:
[http://www.angelfire.com/ar3/acguardian/](http://www.angelfire.com/ar3/acguardian/)

It's pretty bad haha, but that was me at 14.

------
Duhck
I am 28, I started writing code at 9. Started writing AOL "proggies" at about
11. Wrote mail servers, mass mailers, and some other fun tools for
distributing "warez".

My handle was "chud" (shamefully). I wrote tools called Tragic, Mystified, and
Tsunami -- all still found on random angelfire sites.

This one still has screenshots of some of my programs:
[http://amp.00server.com/server.html](http://amp.00server.com/server.html)

Other links:
[http://www.freewebs.com/chewee/aolprograms.htm](http://www.freewebs.com/chewee/aolprograms.htm)

Wonder if any of you were around the AOL scene back in the day.

~~~
alaskamiller
I remember AOHell, HaVoK

~~~
Duhck
Haha I used to write utilities as well but I can't remember what they were
called (punters, IM clients, etc).

------
rectalogic
I'm 48. I wrote the XbaeMatrix X/Motif widget set and uploaded to
export.mit.lcs.mit.edu in 1991. Here's a directory listing from shortly
thereafter
[http://mirrors.ustc.edu.cn/Xorg/R5contrib/Xstuff](http://mirrors.ustc.edu.cn/Xorg/R5contrib/Xstuff)

Xbae is still actively maintained (but no longer by me)
[http://xbae.sourceforge.net/](http://xbae.sourceforge.net/)

------
codingdave
41.

The oldest code I'm aware of is the content management system that runs
infoprint.com, written in 1998 when that product line was a division of IBM.

I know they have been modifying/updating it for the past 15 years, but I can
tell from the URL structures that it is still the same architecture. I'm sure
some lines of code remain from back in my day, but I am equally sure that it
has been re-factored many times over. so it is much more their code than mine
at this point.

------
kalyan02
I am 24.

Oldest code online is from 2006 - I was 17 at that time.

PHP web counters - [http://www.planet-source-
code.com/vb/scripts/ShowCode.asp?tx...](http://www.planet-source-
code.com/vb/scripts/ShowCode.asp?txtCodeId=2145&lngWId=8)

And some open source web designs -
[http://www.opendesigns.org/profile/kalyan/](http://www.opendesigns.org/profile/kalyan/)

------
brentashley
I'm 52. There was plenty of earlier stuff, but the oldest code I can still
find online is from an article I wrote in 1992 on how to write assembly
language routines to extend the QBasic interpreter.

[http://www.petesqbsite.com/sections/tutorials/zines/qbnews/1...](http://www.petesqbsite.com/sections/tutorials/zines/qbnews/10-interpreter.txt)

------
stickydink
I'm 24, working in SF at a mobile gaming startup.

The oldest code I have online is a 'Direct Draw Game Engine', back on
planetsourcecode. Some delicious Visual Basic :)

Dated February 2003, I would have been 13. Good lord!

[http://www1.planet-source-
code.com/vb/scripts/ShowCode.asp?t...](http://www1.planet-source-
code.com/vb/scripts/ShowCode.asp?txtCodeId=43268&lngWId=1)

------
busterarm
29\. The oldest code I had public isn't actually online anymore as of last
year.

I wrote a bunch of global scripts while a member of a social MUD called The
Chatting Zone between 1997 and about 2002.

I just looked and apparently the server was taken down last year or so. This
makes me a little bit sad.

Other than that there seems to a be a few websites I developed or contributed
to around 10 years ago that haven't been changed.

------
sharemywin
I'm 40. It was rewritten into another language but I wrote the original bra
search on victorias secret. I don't remeber the language it was some IBM
product but i didn't even have a looping statement you could only loop through
data.

[http://www.victoriassecret.com/bras/shop-by-
size](http://www.victoriassecret.com/bras/shop-by-size)

------
jmgutn
I'm 25. The oldest code I've online is 3 years old and it's from the time I
used svn and google code. Actually I just reviewed it to remember old times...
[https://code.google.com/p/py2nsis/source/browse/trunk/main.p...](https://code.google.com/p/py2nsis/source/browse/trunk/main.py)

------
oesmith
31, and the oldest I can find is from mid-1998. A small piece of C++ code to
replicate the "cool" then-new docking windows in Visual Studio.

[http://www.codeguru.com/cpp/w-d/docking/article.php/c1451/A-...](http://www.codeguru.com/cpp/w-d/docking/article.php/c1451/A-DevStudio-
like-CControlBar2.htm)

------
michaelbehan
I'm 33. Though I have older code that I cannot find anymore, the oldest I have
online is from 2001 - Rain - the powerful, Unix packet builder. It is still in
*nix distros today.

[https://github.com/jabberwock/rain/tree/master/1.3.0/source](https://github.com/jabberwock/rain/tree/master/1.3.0/source)

------
firloop
I'm 16. The oldest code of mine that I can find online is a PHP script that I
wrote when I was 13. It logs in a MySQL database how many people are on a
website. One of the first things I've ever written.

[https://github.com/lukemiles/php-users-
online](https://github.com/lukemiles/php-users-online)

------
gregrata
I'm 45. Oldest code I could find is 18 years old. Game was from 1995 - last
code drop was 1998. I thought I had some Commodore stuff from the
early/mid-80's up, but can't find it. Ack! :)

[http://www.ratajik.net/TunnelWars/](http://www.ratajik.net/TunnelWars/)

(And YES, that IS a OS/2 program!)

~~~
gregrata
... and yeah, that site DOES look like it was written in the 90's... as it WAS
written in the 90's and hasn't been updated!

------
Keyframe
33, intro to renderman shading language:
[http://www.vga.hr/resources/tutorials/3d/rsl/](http://www.vga.hr/resources/tutorials/3d/rsl/)
12-13 years old. I'm sure I could find older somewhere as well, but this is
what I am sure about.

------
willcate
I'm 53. This rather crude little website I wrote has been online for 14 years
(since 1999). Some folks subsequently have monkeyed around with some of the
content, but the basic design is mine, still intact.

[http://rivervalleyradio.com](http://rivervalleyradio.com)

~~~
millstone
It's held up pretty well!

    
    
        <meta name="generator" content="Microsoft FrontPage 4.0">
    

:)

~~~
willcate
LOL - God as my witness I did not use FrontPage. That would be the
"subsequent" edits.

------
binarymax
Sadly, I no longer have the code, but I wrote a Logo script in 1985 (when I
was 7) that generated this image:
[http://max.io/assets/media/CPU_1985_small.jpg](http://max.io/assets/media/CPU_1985_small.jpg)

I printed it with a dotmatrix, and still have it.

------
zachlatta
I am 16. I used to play a game called Graal a lot and have code in
[https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/graalonline-
classic/id343297...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/graalonline-
classic/id343297938) from back when I was 12.

------
smokey_the_bear
I'm 31. It's not really code, but I made this terrible website for my dad 17
years ago. He still likes it.
[http://www.public.iastate.edu/~hentzel/Akpatok/](http://www.public.iastate.edu/~hentzel/Akpatok/)

~~~
selimthegrim
You don't have a brother named Robert by any chance?

~~~
smokey_the_bear
Sure do.

------
wilderw
60 years old. Some PDP-11 code found from 1977 (36 years ago).
[http://pdp-10.trailing-
edge.com/decuslib10-07/01/43,50446/gi...](http://pdp-10.trailing-
edge.com/decuslib10-07/01/43,50446/gidus.p11.html)

Those were the days!

~~~
babawere
Can't remember when i saw something like this last

------
zeus13i
25 here.

Oldest online is when I was 21; a GPU-based MD5-password cracker/recovery
program:
[https://code.google.com/p/cudamd5](https://code.google.com/p/cudamd5)

It was one of, if not the, fastest at the time :D

------
zaidf
From 1999, I was 12 :) [http://www.planet-source-
code.com/vb/scripts/ShowCode.asp?tx...](http://www.planet-source-
code.com/vb/scripts/ShowCode.asp?txtCodeId=4854&lngWId=1)

------
benhoyt
I'm 2^5. My oldest code online is a Forth compiler I wrote when I was 2^4:
[https://github.com/benhoyt/third#readme](https://github.com/benhoyt/third#readme)

~~~
lutusp
> I'm 2^5. My oldest code online is a Forth compiler I wrote when I was 2^4
> ...

Hah! Birthdays at your house must be really big events, each taking twice as
long to appear as the previous one.

Maybe that's not such a bad idea. As we get older, time seems to pass more
quickly, so ...

------
mooreds
I'm 36. A book list application I wrote in spring of 2003 to learn php is
still online (I host it).

I wrote some java applets (demoing the half life of radiation) in the summer
of 1998, but couldn't track them down.

------
jaxn
36.

Oldest code I could find is a project on Sourceforge that I created in 2001:
[http://sourceforge.net/projects/edubase/](http://sourceforge.net/projects/edubase/)

------
steerpike
39 and my oldest code online would be some LPC from 1993 that was part of a
MUD that's still available. [http://anguish.org/](http://anguish.org/)

------
laurenstill
I'm 31, and my oldest real code is about 2 years or so. Unless random stuff
from college counts (10 years ago).

------
xtraclass
I'm 46. My oldest software is from 1997, still running, a software for
checking technical details of airplanes.

------
irremediable
I'm 21 and my oldest code is seven years old. It's stuff I wrote for an MMORPG
I used to play.

------
fwhiffahder
I'm 14. Does HTML count? Because I have a hideous CSS-less page up somewhere
from when I was 8.

------
andersthue
I'm 41, my oldest code online is a cms system i wrote around 2000.

Did some utils for BBS' back in 1994.

------
Namrog84
I am impressed with the diversity of this thread! Both in age and area
interest!

------
peteretep
30, and BackPAN has some stuff from Feb 2000 when I was 16(!)

------
jeremyswank
56\. does html count? pwp.detritus.net from 1997.

------
a3voices
I'm 26. My oldest code online is here:

[http://www.angelfire.com/ma3/medmath/](http://www.angelfire.com/ma3/medmath/)

I wrote it in 2000, I think, to do a homework problem.

