Still running strong after 1,532 days without a code change.

Thanks for sharing

The system works on old PC with MS-DOS, and database is in clipper. I think the system works for at least 15 years already.

All this happened while I was still an "administrative assistant" on a temp wage. After a time, I left- it was time, and in any case they'd said that my work was going to be replaced by an integrated SAP solution that would span the entire company's workflow. I moved on, got a much better job and have been programming off the back of that original job ever since.

This was in 2006. I spoke to a former co-worker for the first time in years about six months ago, who told me to my jaw dropping surprise that they were still running my application. Aside from anything else, I was blown away that the thing still worked. There's a certain morbid curiosity that makes me want to look at the code I wrote back then, I'm sure I would cringe. But hey, it's still going.

Actually that's a little unfair. The thing is these are businesses where (presumably) vital parts are left to fester. I presume because the management 'dont get it', but every business has these corner cases, and odd parts. I think the foolishness of ERP was ever daring to dream it could be solved monolithically.

THe future surely is a form of SOA where some guy in accounting can write a crappy service, authenticate it globally and plug it into the enterprise directory system.

But this really assumes everyone working will be able to program. Just like we assume everyone at work can read.

She came back to the same company 30 years later in a much more senior position. And out of curiosity checked to see if any of her old code was still there. She found that cron job she had written in a language that she no longer knew and found that it had never been touched. She asked why not, and was told it never broke.

Unfortunately that company imploded in the mortgage crisis, so her code is probably no longer running.

I used Turbo C V2 I think it was, with my own home rolled DOS windowing library of the kind that was ubiquitous at the time. Basically it was a smell-of-an-oily-rag development for a friend of mine who had taken over a near derelict 20 lane bowling alley and was upgrading it from "manual" scoring to "computer" scoring but couldn't afford a 100K "automatic" scoring system from Brunswick or the other big player (can't remember their name).

Anyway, it was a successful and fun project, but after 8 years or so the bowling alley was gutted by fire. Years later I was travelling through a small provincial town and saw a 10 pin bowling alley. Something told me to stop the car and go in. What do you know, there was my whole system, lanes plus controller, running a small 8 lane setup. Talking to the guy (potentially a mistake, what if he wanted after sales service :- ) it transpired he'd bought the equipment in the (literal) fire sale and figured out how to hook up the network and get it all going. He'd even split it in two and got it running another system in another nearby town. I was seriously impressed that he'd managed that actually.

Whilst on a university placement doing some web coding and databases work, the guy in the office next to me was having real problems with his website.

Being curious, I asked for the URL and took a look. A classic ASP and Access database powered website that was probably held together by bubblegum. He had outsourced the work to a Chinese company because they were cheaper than UK based companies (important point for later). The site was full of every web security hole known. Mainly lots and lots of SQL injection holes. He asked if I could fix the pile of garbage and I honestly couldn't, I don't like rewriting but when its an old (this was 3 years ago) tech with no English comments and their code quality zero, copy pasting everything.

So in the evenings and weekends for a month I rewrote it to ASP.NET MVC (1.0, latest at the time) and SQL Server. I got him to select a template off Themeforest for $15 that I reworked slightly (and badly, I'm not a designer).

He is happy, I am happy with £500 for my work. I finish my placement and go back to university but came back to my placement for another year to do a startup idea. He had moved offices and we have very little contact.

After finishing university and 2 years later, I join a "Soul Destroying Corp" (not the one you are thinking of) and decide that isn't what I want to do with my life, so I setup my business and tell him that I'm now doing my own thing and looking for clients.

Turns out my weekend/evening £500 website generated him around £500,000+ in revenue (not profit) and his business grew from just him to 5 people. All his sales leads came through the website.

From September last year till now, I have rewritten it and we are automating more of his "manual" (lots of Word, Excel and paper) to be totally automated or a few mouse clicks.

Wow, when I think back, that website was terrible but it worked well for 2 years and grew his business. Huge ROI for him but now he is paying me back by hiring me to rewrite/automate more of his business.

That said, if we all went back to keyboard interfaces, green on black screens, and people who used the same software for 10 years and got used to its "quirks", software development would be a lot easier. ;)

Naturally I thought, that OS came out 10 years ago, has been end-of-lifed, this is a fairly new store, and the eol software is connecting to some text-based something somewhere - who knows how old that part is?

I have a friend that worked for an auto supply-something company that would remote into their customers computers. He would tell me (this was about 3 years ago) that he couldn't believe some of the ancient stuff he would come across on those systems. Tons were Windows95, lots of them had malware running on them, and the business owners somehow kept their business going.

I'm not talking so much about old programs that just run, but more about how businesses can keep old stuff hanging around. Even with malware and such on it. It's obviously just another tool to keep the cash flow coming in. Can't blame them, but such a huge contrast to my day to day which is usually working on/with the latest of everything.