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I posit if you want to make sure your code survives you, write video game code. Nevertheless, my own examples are all non-games. In the early nineties I wrote

by Udo 10y ago

I posit if you want to make sure your code survives you, write video game code. Nevertheless, my own examples are all non-games. In the early nineties I wrote a program in Turbo Pascal to manage grades and print report cards, I heard one elementary school in my home town was using this until 2012. On one of my first web programming jobs, I made a cold fusion-like template interpreter and ecommerce engine in C, that was about 1998. One completely online-based company that we launched with this software kept on running on it until it was sold two years ago. In the early 2000s, my startup produced a web content management system that I wrote most of the code for, and sometimes I still get usage questions about it even today (to be honest, knowing that code is still used in production is not a good feeling). Oh, I just remembered: around that time I wrote some microcontroller code that went into a certain brand of PA systems for TV studios, I'm pretty sure that's still in use... My oldest personal project is a chat place where RPG players can meet up and roll dice, I think that launched around 2003 in some incarnation and though it's getting updates and extensions from time to time, the core code is almost unchanged: https://rolz.org https://rolz.org

mosburger 10y ago
> I posit if you want to make sure your code survives you, write video game code. I dunno, firmware seems like a pretty safe bet too. I wrote seek algorithm firmware for Quantum's Atlas series of SCSI disk drives in the late 1990s, I suspect there are still a few of those spinning out there somewhere.
- technion 10y ago
  I wrote seek algorithm firmware for Quantum's Atlas series of SCSI disk drives Are you aware of anything at all like that which is opensource/published? This sounds like something that could be fascinating to read.
  - mosburger 10y ago
    Unfortunately, no I don't. :( Our lead servo engineer (and a lot of people in the industry) were strongly influenced by Franklin, Powell, and Workman's book "Digital Control of Dynamic Systems," and IIRC there's a chapter devoted to disk drive control systems in it. I worked a bit on the seek algorithms, but I also worked on the repeatable-runout cancellation system, which was actually a lot cooler to work on but less interesting to most people. It basically did Fourier Transforms to compute "predictable" errors staying over the track caused by things like disk shift or "potato chipping" of the disks. That error could then be injected back into the voice-coil motor to help keep the heads in the right place. It was all written in a very low level assembly language on a custom ASIC we designed in-house with no floating point arithmetic. :) That was almost 20 years ago at the very beginning of my career and it's still some of the coolest code I've ever written. :-/

by Udo 10y ago

mosburger 10y ago

> I posit if you want to make sure your code survives you, write video game code. I dunno, firmware seems like a pretty safe bet too. I wrote seek algorithm firmware for Quantum's Atlas series of SCSI disk drives in the late 1990s, I suspect there are still a few of those spinning out there somewhere.

technion 10y ago
I wrote seek algorithm firmware for Quantum's Atlas series of SCSI disk drives Are you aware of anything at all like that which is opensource/published? This sounds like something that could be fascinating to read.
- mosburger 10y ago
  Unfortunately, no I don't. :( Our lead servo engineer (and a lot of people in the industry) were strongly influenced by Franklin, Powell, and Workman's book "Digital Control of Dynamic Systems," and IIRC there's a chapter devoted to disk drive control systems in it. I worked a bit on the seek algorithms, but I also worked on the repeatable-runout cancellation system, which was actually a lot cooler to work on but less interesting to most people. It basically did Fourier Transforms to compute "predictable" errors staying over the track caused by things like disk shift or "potato chipping" of the disks. That error could then be injected back into the voice-coil motor to help keep the heads in the right place. It was all written in a very low level assembly language on a custom ASIC we designed in-house with no floating point arithmetic. :) That was almost 20 years ago at the very beginning of my career and it's still some of the coolest code I've ever written. :-/