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
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? :)
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 . 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.
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.
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 :)
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:
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.
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-... (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.
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.
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:
> Ah, nostalgia. There are closed Solaris SPARC specific bugs in the issue tracker :)
Nostalgia indeed, that's like a whole other era by now. There's a lot of technology like that that's just on the edge of my memory -- like the Token Ring networks I would see even into the mid/late-90s.
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.
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.
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
It's about 1000 lines of spaghetti code, at the time I was really proud to have produced such a huge program.
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). Late 70's early 80's.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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! :)
33, intro to renderman shading language: 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.
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://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
Here's an online article about some programs I wrote in the early 1970s, before Apple Writer:
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....
All my programs are free and open-source.
Here's an old article about me:
http://www.atariarchives.org/deli/cottage_computer_programmi...