14 ms·

I found one of my first programs (Java, 2011) on the Wayback Machine and it runs

210 points by khiner 2y ago

khiner 2y ago
One of the first programs I ever wrote - a program to find valid English crossword fills given a grid pattern with optional partial completions. This project came to mind recently and I looked around on the Wayback Machine. Turns out I posted the jar on MediaFire and linked to it on an old blog on Jan 2, 2011. Luckily, there was [_one capture_ of the jar on MediaFire](https://web.archive.org/web/20240123154949/https://download1655.mediafire.com/lbbcl7ez7adgib9-IUIf0OotUQ4kI4yMugl-Z7a2t57Sf6zL1ibXfzI6OpKsYixWErxnSa_xXvfW7VUqBTZMquQnFAxdKdhgMHDW7saQ3hopgoAbW0-Qae5nX9nbIjSjlrs595R8mCsxTh5KCv0ls3-Pizdj5ZDuPJ0Inlg2CUKDws4/rwpl49xusm55s2a/WordFillVer2.jar https://web.archive.org/web/20240123154949/https://download1...) from oddly recently (Jan 23 2024). I downloaded and opened it on my 2023 MacBook Air, and it ran! Since it's Java, I'm guessing it runs on other computers, too :) It was a delight to find it still working. Anyone else ever find an old program you thought you lost and get it running again?
- khiner 2y ago
  EDIT: As a couple observant folks pointed out, the original MediaFire link actually still works, so WB machine saved the day by making it possible to find the link, but the jar was also still hosted on the today-internet :)
- theanonymousone 2y ago
  Nice job. Now maybe you can make it a web application using CheerpJ.
lnxg33k1 2y ago
My first program was a mIRC script :D
- anthk 2y ago
  Well, I've seen the opposite: an awk script to connect to IRC...
  - cqqxo4zV46cp 2y ago
    One of my first programs was the sensible center: an IRC bot written in Perl.
fragmede 2y ago
Damn, that makes me want to see if I can dig up the asm code I wrote for the TI-83 and run in on an emulator on modern hardware. Really happy for you that you were able to find that jar!
n9 2y ago
The first major piece of code that I ever wrote was a publishing workflow management system for a major newspaper. It routed page images to presses and generated pdfs of each page in each edition of the newspaper and made pdfs of each day's newspaper editions and published them to a static website where they were archived. I was only allowed to use perl 4 to write this software and I wasn't allowed to use a database, even though the datastructure for a day's publishing batch had tens of thousands of keys and values and required RDBMs style queries. It also features a configurable postscript parser that extracts all kinds of data from completed newspaper pages that informs the publishing system. When I wrote it I was told that it would run for a few months only while we figured out how to get a $5M commercial product to handle the work. The whole thing was written in perl 4 style OO Perl and came in at about 16k lines of code in the end -- most of the code was for the postscript processor and tons of cruft that I had to write to made a relational DBMS in memory because I wasn't allowed to use mysql. It took me four months to write it. I launched it in January of 2002 and it runs to this day. I know this because I got a call about it last month where my replacement's replacement's replacement asked me a few questions about what OO Perl is because he wanted to make a few changes. Good luck! It still runs and is responsbile for about 80% of what it was originally built to do. It is used by hundreds of people daily, who by all reports absolutely hate it. There are people working at the newspaper today that use it regularly that were not born when I wrote it. I am twice as old as I was when I wrote it. They have apparently tried to replace it several times over the last 22 years and have failed to do so... this is likely due to the blockheadedness of my old boss (who is still there) as much as the radically insane obscurity of my code, which is exactly how you'd expect 16k lines of 22 year old OO Perl 4 would be.
- justusthane 2y ago
  That’s a really incredible story. I’m not sure how much more you remember/are able to share, but I would kill to read a longer post about this.
  - Folcon 2y ago
    It's in moments like this that I miss the hacker news magazine[0], because I had relatively high certainty that when stories like this popped up, the poster in question would get interviewed and their story would appear in the next edition. Not sure who else recalls it? Really appreciated the monthly format as well, I think summarising the last month and going in-depth on specific stories ended up being a good touchstone for what happened in the community. If anyone is interested in picking up the torch, I for one would be happy to resubscribe to it :)... -[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1261499 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1261499
aabhay 2y ago
The wayback machine is pure nostalgia. Every time I go there I’m truly amazed at what it’s like to have a society wide memory that automatically captures these different moments of our lives. Old pictures I never thought I’d ever see again. Landing pages for old companies I’ve built and only a handful of my closest friends remember. Blog posts from long deleted places, times, and mental caverns. Just incredible.
- otteromkram 2y ago
  I try donating every few months. Maybe $5-$10 each time. Like yourself, I think it's an incredible resource and don't mind pitching in( when I can) to help keep it running.
  - Elyra 2y ago
    Same here, I have them set as my charity through Amazon smile and humble bundle
    - afruitpie 2y ago
      Amazon Smile was shut down, unfortunately: https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/amazon-closing-amazonsmile-to-focus-its-philanthropic-giving-to-programs-with-greater-impact https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/amazon-closing...
  - sumtechguy 2y ago
    Hope they can last the lawsuit that is still going on from what happened with that book thing.
- Scoundreller 2y ago
  Reminds me of some reddit post with a link to some page with some local history, but all of the image links were broken. Within a few minutes I posted the link to Wayback and they were delighted because they happened to be archived there.
- eggdaft 2y ago
calvinmorrison 2y ago
Here's the oldest i could find, still hosted by sourceforge all these years later... © Calvin Morrison 2009 https://mocicon.sourceforge.net/ https://mocicon.sourceforge.net/
Brajeshwar 2y ago
This is cool. I went there to check if I can find some of mine and found the page that links to some of my public downloads, unfortunately, none of the Zip files were archived. And the Ruffle Flash Emulator still do not work with most interactive Flash Applications!
- thaliaarchi 2y ago
  You might try building Ruffle from source. I’ve found that online versions don’t work for the games I want, due to using an outdated version of Ruffle.
Suppafly 2y ago
My son found some of my old java code from 20 years ago and managed to get a couple of the programs to run, with some very minor modifications. The java applets not so much, because no browser has had support for applets for a decade or so.
- palad1n 2y ago
  Use appletviewer. I have something from 1998 which still runs using that.
  - Suppafly 2y ago
    I'll have to check it out, we spent a few minutes looking and it seemed like they don't ship it anymore, but I guess you can still get Java 8 from Oracle and it should include it.
jraph 2y ago
If you are so inclined, a decompiler might be able to "recreate" a big part of the source code. IntelliJ IDEA's one (Fernflower) works well, its fork Vineflower seems like an interesting option too. Both are released under Apache 2. Fernflower works so well I don't always immediately notice I'm debugging decompiled code.
- rafaelgoncalves 2y ago
  Nice, didn't know about fernflower, thanks for the recommendation! I use JavaDecompile (JD-GUI)¹ too much and is already in my workflow, but from insights like this i see some nicer/better tools. 1 - JD-GUI - https://java-decompiler.github.io/ https://java-decompiler.github.io/
  - jraph 2y ago
    Seems convenient, I'll keep this in mind for whenever I may need this.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
nikolajan 2y ago
My first piece of code (substantive) was an ecommerce platform (frontend and backend). Complete overkill, and the startup was dead a year later, but the project itself was fun. Likely 15k+ lines of code, not a single unit test; simpler times :)
thrdbndndn 2y ago
>on the Wayback Machine I mean, the original MF link literally still works (I intentionally break the link in case HN filters it)[1]. > Luckily, there was [archived] from oddly recently (Jan 23 2024) You can see archiving reason on WB's index page [2]. In this case, it was archived due to "why: archiveteam, archiveteam_mediafire". [1] http s:// www. mediafire .com/file/rwpl49xusm55s2a/WordFillVer2.jar [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20240000000000*/https://download1655.mediafire.com/lbbcl7ez7adgib9-IUIf0OotUQ4kI4yMugl-Z7a2t57Sf6zL1ibXfzI6OpKsYixWErxnSa_xXvfW7VUqBTZMquQnFAxdKdhgMHDW7saQ3hopgoAbW0-Qae5nX9nbIjSjlrs595R8mCsxTh5KCv0ls3-Pizdj5ZDuPJ0Inlg2CUKDws4/rwpl49xusm55s2a/WordFillVer2.jar https://web.archive.org/web/20240000000000*/https://download...
- khiner 2y ago
  Good catch! I didn’t realize the original link still worked. Also didn’t know about the “why” notes on WB index. Thanks!
  - khiner 2y ago
    Updated to reflect this.
haolez 2y ago
On a slightly related note, old Emacs modes (elisp) run incredibly well to this day. There might be working code there that spans over 3 decades.
- Zambyte 2y ago
  Lisps that support macros are pretty much infinitely backwards compatible. Even across dialects. I wrote a set of macros to be able to program in a subset of Scheme and Hylang, and run that code on either :)
  - anthk 2y ago
    One guy form the PDP-10 'tribe' wrote a Maclisp interpreter in Common Lisp with relative ease. 90% of the code would still run as is, and maybe under Elisp too...
bandrami 2y ago
One of my first jobs was writing a Perl script in 1996 that did an incredibly mundane set of checks on some routers in a datacenter (using this really cool new technology "BGP") and offered essentially a public REST API (though we didn't call it that back then) you could periodically poll to see their status. Every so often I check to see if it's still there, and it always has been. I really hope it makes it to 30 years.
gedy 2y ago
Mine was from 1984, I recovered basic program from a Commodore 64 disk using a USB to 1541 controller. A character sheet creator for a "homicidal maniacs" role playing game my school friends and I created :-).
brlcad 2y ago
Boggles my mind when coders don't save everything they've ever written. It's easy to be a digital pack-rat without much consequence. That said, my first Java 1.02 programs from the 90's still compile and the old jars run surprisingly well too. Color me impressed!
- ks2048 2y ago
  It was quite different before the internet. I'm still holding out hope of finding some of my old BASIC programs from the 80s on a 5¼-inch floppy disk in my parents' basement. But they are probably gone.
  - code_duck 2y ago
    I wish I had the Logo and BASIC programs I wrote for the c64 in the early 80s. I still have the disks, so there's vague hope. Even more, I'd love the animations and images I made on the Amiga later in the decade, but that's more unlikely.
  - theanonymousone 2y ago
    > before the internet Even before GitHub, probably. Dropbox was a big step forward, still.
    - camtarn 2y ago
      Eh, not really. Even before source control was widely used by non-professionals, there was still the habit of copying all your stuff over whenever you upgraded to a newer hard disk. I've got random stuff sitting on my hard drive that probably dates to my first PC in around 1996.
  - j_french 2y ago
    I found some of my first BASIC programs recently, written in 89/90 on an amstrad464. They're on cassette tape. I have a tape deck with line out, but I don't even know how to start trying to get data off an "audio" cassette tape these days? The programs weren't fancy: one was for picking lotto numbers for my mam (the national lottery had recently launched in Ireland so it was a novelty.) Also I was 10.
Takennickname 2y ago
What a strong ad for Java
- dehrmann 2y ago
  Java's maintained almost perfect backward compatibility. If you want code you wrote today to run in 10 more years, Java is probably the best choice. Most other languages have too much of a history of breaking changes, or if you pick C/C++, you'll have issues linking against an old UI library.
  - worthless-trash 2y ago
    There are many other languages with a better lindy effect rating ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect), common lisp, erlang, fortran and more. I won't doubt how java doing well, but other languages have it beat.
    - dehrmann 2y ago
      > common lisp, erlang, fortran That's a pretty esoteric list. Javascript would have been a better choice because of widespread deployment by multiple vendors and heavy legacy.
      - worthless-trash 2y ago
        Javascript is still pretty young (comparatively) however I do believe you'd be right in saying that its likely to be around for a very long time.
        itronitron 2y ago
        Interestingly, Javascript is just as old as Java, and Python is older.
        worthless-trash 2y ago
guessbest 2y ago
I have Objective-C software for iOS that was built for iOS 3 that still runs on the latest version of iOS and people still pay for it. Strange how language stability is an achievable goal.
- kristianp 2y ago
  Why don't you post the app store link? That's allowed.
noufalibrahim 2y ago
My earliest "large" program which I can remember was a drawing program I wrote in GW BASIC. You could draw figures, change brushes, I think it had a crude filling function and a few other things. In my innocence, I backed it up onto 5.25" floppy disks, labelled them neatly and put them in a box. This was in the late 1980s. Fast forward to 2024, I still have the disks but no drive to read them. On the other hand, the notebooks where I wrote out some of the routines for the programs are still with me and I can read them. Says a lot about "digital archiving".
- mdorazio 2y ago
  FYI if you want to get things off a 5.25 floppy, you can get a Greaseweazle for $25 and use it with any 5.25 drive. https://decromancer.ca/greaseweazle/ https://decromancer.ca/greaseweazle/
- darkstar_16 2y ago
  Are you me ? I wrote an exact program like this in GW Basic back in the day. I remember adding the ability to draw coloured lines but I had no way to verify since my computer monitor was one of those with green coloured pixels. Finally got to see everything in full colour at my school lab and was so thrilled. Those were the days ...
  - noufalibrahim 2y ago
    Nice. I had a 256 colour VGA monitor so... :D
- Almondsetat 2y ago
  >Says a lot about "digital archiving" It doesn't, since you could easily buy a USB floppy disk reader
  - Narishma 2y ago
    You don't have to buy anything to read the notebook though.
Repulsion9513 2y ago
> Luckily, there was one capture of the jar on MediaFire from oddly recently (Jan 23 2024). Why is that lucky? The MediaFire link is still live anyway.
- khiner 2y ago
  Someone else pointed this out as well - I didn't realize the original MediaFire link still worked. Updated to reflect.
sandos 2y ago
Wow, I did some work in summer 1996 in java, web applets! Would be awesome to find that again, but I think the chances are less than slim for that happening. Actually I did some somewhat impressive graphical x86 assembly programs around 1994-95 which I would have really liked to see today, but I saw no value in those once I had done them. :/
INTPenis 2y ago
I recently realized how much data the wayback machine is archiving when I found my old webpage with dozens of videos and photos of my puppies being born and they all worked.
squigz 2y ago
The Internet Archive is (IMO) one of the most important endeavours of our time. Consider donating: https://archive.org/donate https://archive.org/donate
- mdaniel 2y ago
  I normally echo this sentiment, and I can easily imagine an outcome through which the money could pay for lawyers, but in the ongoing discussion about their court case <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40201053 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40201053> there was a comment that predicts any money they get is just going to end up in the pockets of Hachette when they eventually lose :-( I recognize this is a very pessimistic take but ... for consideration
xandrius 2y ago
Not to be snarky but 2011 is yesterday for programming, no major shift. I'd imagine almost all code written there would be able to run today.
- fragmede 2y ago
  You've had a very different experience of the past 13 years if you've experienced no major shifts. Even the past year has had a whole big change with the advent of LLMs, nevermind the rise of the web, VSCode, typescript, rust, and more. In 2011, Java was on version 7. We're on 22 now in 2024. There have been some paradigm shifts in Java during that time. Streams (Java 8), Lambda expressions (Java 9), the var keyword (Java 10), Records (Java 14), switch and yield (Java 12/14), instanceof (Java 16). Functional programming over OOP; Cloud and microservices, emphasis on security, DevX, concurrency. Code written in 2011 still runs, but the world's changed around it.
  - squigz 2y ago
    The rise of the web? In the past 13 years? Gosh does that make me feel old...
    - fragmede 2y ago
      Shit, I learned to program before there was Google.
      - xandrius 2y ago
        I studied OpenGL when all I could find was literally 1 tutorial on it and it was not in my native language.
      - brabel 2y ago
        Reminds of a random comment or tweet I read somewhere where the person said their young children just couldn't believe she was so old that she was born before Google existed :D they just couldn't believe her :D so cute.
    - 2y ago
amouat 2y ago
I wrote a similar program once. To get it to be efficient I had to use a bunch of heuristics including scrabble scoring words, so it would prefer words with low scrabble scores which were more likely to fit in with other words.
DrBazza 2y ago
One of my first pieces of code from my first job in 1997 still exists and runs according to a long suffering colleague that still works at the same place. That also means the code has gone from SCCS -> CVS -> Clearcase -> Perforce -> SVN -> Git. That's enterprise development for you.
eurekin 2y ago
> Download the jar file > https://github.com/khiner/CrosswordFiller/WordFillVer2.jar https://github.com/khiner/CrosswordFiller/WordFillVer2.jar Returns: > Not Found currently
- danlindley 2y ago
  It can still be downloaded via the file on the repo, just not using that direct link in the description. I'm not sure how the maintainer came to determine that is the link, since I'm almost certain that never would have been the way.
- khiner 2y ago
  Fixed, sorry about that
dolmen 2y ago
I found mine too, archived in 2001, but my browser can't run Java applets anymore. https://web.archive.org/web/20010407081008/http://www.multimania.com/dolmen/barcode/index.shtml https://web.archive.org/web/20010407081008/http://www.multim... In fact I noticed 10 years after the publishing when I tried to run the applet that it didn't even run because the compiler of that time had generated invalid byte code (not caught by the JVM) or that the source code itself was invalid and that had not been caught by the compiler. "Compile Once, Run Everywhere", they said.
- brabel 2y ago
  If you want to run your applet today, try CherpJ: https://cheerpj.com/ https://cheerpj.com/ This should be able to run absolutely any Java in the browser.
winternewt 2y ago
The first Java code I wrote was in 1996 (IIRC) and it is still out there, but it doesn't work anymore because it is a Java applet.
- matja 2y ago
  Most Linux distros still package jdk8-openjdk which has appletviewer.
smusamashah 2y ago
To author, if you use IntelliJ, you can very easily get the source back by dragging/opening compiled .class files in IntelliJ
self_awareness 2y ago
I've found some of my old .jar's (some small games) written on Windows in the 2000's. They still run on Linux 20 years later. That's why I like the JRE.
linker3000 2y ago
I found some old Turbo Pascal code I wrote in the late 1980s - early 1990s and managed to compile and run it under a DOS emulator a few years back. The code is a map editor for the Rockford ('Boulderdash') PC game. Unfortunately, the versions of Rockford in the wild, for download and online play, seem to be based on a later game engine and the map format has changed so the editor no longer works. The code was designed to produce registered and un-registered versions, but I never released it into the wild. If anyone has a copy of the original Rockford game version I'd love to know about it. https://github.com/linker3000/Historic-code-PC-Pascal-and-ASM-/blob/master/ROCKED~1.PAS https://github.com/linker3000/Historic-code-PC-Pascal-and-AS...
NovemberWhiskey 2y ago
I promise you that there are major businesses still running on Java 6 code from 2011.
- oaiey 2y ago
  As a dark matter architect, I can tell you: You do not need to promise. That is reality ;). You let the system run some years successfully, never touch a running system, than you fire fire-everyone involved cycle, then do something important, maybe plan the successor system and but then scrap that. And then budget is tight and the UX needs it more urgent. 2024 it is.
- amne 2y ago
  I don't even know what Java 6 means. Last time I wrote something in Java it said Java 1.5 compiled Java class data, version 49.0 (Java 1.5)
  - wizzwizz4 2y ago
    They rebranded Java 1.x as Java SE x, then later just Java x.
    - NovemberWhiskey 2y ago
      No, it's way more confusing than that. They started with Java 1.0 and 1.1 - then to "Java 2" at version 1.2, so you have Java 2 version 1.2 ... they then stuck with that through the version after 1.4 - but rather than 1.5, that was special as it was Java 2 version 5.0 ... thereafter they're just numbered with the plain number.
      - wizzwizz4 2y ago
        So that's where the 2 in J2ME comes from!
      - hbn 2y ago
        > thereafter they're just numbered with the plain number. $ java -version java version "1.8.0_391" Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.8.0_391-b13) Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM (build 25.391-b13, mixed mode) ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
oefrha 2y ago
My first "major" program was a ASCII art based Super Mario Bros clone in Turbo Pascal from 2005. I don't have it anymore, but since Turbo Pascal hasn't changed and text terminals haven't changed, I'm pretty sure it still works.
booleanbetrayal 2y ago
Wayback machine lead me to rediscover a Doom 2 level I made awhile back [1]. What a treasure of a resource! [1] https://www.doomworld.com/idgames/levels/doom2/p-r/rurqta https://www.doomworld.com/idgames/levels/doom2/p-r/rurqta
jdeisenberg 2y ago
Plain old JavaScript (without frameworks) holds up rather well. My simplified blackjack game from 1998 (modified in 2003) and a calendar program from 2001 (probably written before then) still work in a modern browser. The calendar program uses document.write(), which is very embarrassing nowadays, but then again, that was what people did back in 2001.
jandrese 2y ago
I wrote some Hypercard stacks back in the 90s and uploaded them to AOL. A couple of years ago I found it again on archive.org complete with emulator.
alhsn 2y ago
I suggest that you reverse engineer (decompile) the jar file and check the java code too. If you didn't know, it is very easy to do.
brabel 2y ago
You can download the old Java build system, Apache Ant, from 2003 and it still runs without issue: https://archive.apache.org/dist/ant/binaries/ https://archive.apache.org/dist/ant/binaries/ Download the bin.zip distribution, unzip it, then run this comand: java -cp "lib/*" org.apache.tools.ant.Main It runs on Java 21 without issues :D. Java is like Windows: it can run stuff written for it forever.
fsloth 2y ago
So I’ve turned into an old man screaming at the sky. 2011 is not that long ago! Lot’s of production code from that time can be still considered fairly ”fresh”.
tmoertel 2y ago
The oldest thing I've written that I can still find on the Internet — the original disks are long gone — is a microbe simulator I wrote about 35 years ago. Apparently, at least two people archived a copy: https://www.macintoshrepository.org/11521-microbe-swarm https://www.macintoshrepository.org/11521-microbe-swarm I suspect that it would run as is on a 68k Macintosh emulator.
urbandw311er 2y ago
I also found mine! The first program I wrote (aged 13) was in 1991 - it was “RADBench” a program for the Commodore Amiga that created a slimmed-down workbench that lived on a RAD disk (like RAM but survived a soft reboot). Meant you could use your computer without having to reinsert the disk containing the main OS binaries whenever you wanted to do anything. I distributed it via public domain shareware listings - back then you had to send them off to a distributor and they would advertise their apps in the major computer magazines. I used to get royalty cheques in the post! Which I think I spent on sweets. Turns out most of the shareware from back then has been archived online so I was able to get it running again on an Amiga emulator and read all the immature embarrassing stuff that a 13 year old kid thinks belongs in a ReadMe… ;-)
daemin 2y ago
I've recently dug up some of my first "larger" scale projects that I implemented in the early 2000's, including compiled executables, which managed to run unmodified on modern Windows. That is an achievement in compatibility. It was 2 demos of my game engine project, one compiled in late 2001 and the other in 2002 based on the exe file timestamps. They used Win32 and OpenGL, and surprisingly work faster on my laptop with integrated graphics than on my beast desktop PC.

210 points by khiner 2y ago

One of the first programs I ever wrote - a program to find valid English crossword fills given a grid pattern with optional partial completions. This project came to mind recently and I looked around on the Wayback Machine. Turns out I posted the jar on MediaFire and linked to it on an old blog on Jan 2, 2011. Luckily, there was [_one capture_ of the jar on MediaFire](https://web.archive.org/web/20240123154949/https://download1655.mediafire.com/lbbcl7ez7adgib9-IUIf0OotUQ4kI4yMugl-Z7a2t57Sf6zL1ibXfzI6OpKsYixWErxnSa_xXvfW7VUqBTZMquQnFAxdKdhgMHDW7saQ3hopgoAbW0-Qae5nX9nbIjSjlrs595R8mCsxTh5KCv0ls3-Pizdj5ZDuPJ0Inlg2CUKDws4/rwpl49xusm55s2a/WordFillVer2.jar https://web.archive.org/web/20240123154949/https://download1...) from oddly recently (Jan 23 2024). I downloaded and opened it on my 2023 MacBook Air, and it ran! Since it's Java, I'm guessing it runs on other computers, too :) It was a delight to find it still working. Anyone else ever find an old program you thought you lost and get it running again?

khiner 2y ago
EDIT: As a couple observant folks pointed out, the original MediaFire link actually still works, so WB machine saved the day by making it possible to find the link, but the jar was also still hosted on the today-internet :)
theanonymousone 2y ago
Nice job. Now maybe you can make it a web application using CheerpJ.

lnxg33k1 2y ago

My first program was a mIRC script :D

anthk 2y ago
Well, I've seen the opposite: an awk script to connect to IRC...
- cqqxo4zV46cp 2y ago
  One of my first programs was the sensible center: an IRC bot written in Perl.

fragmede 2y ago

Damn, that makes me want to see if I can dig up the asm code I wrote for the TI-83 and run in on an emulator on modern hardware. Really happy for you that you were able to find that jar!

n9 2y ago

The first major piece of code that I ever wrote was a publishing workflow management system for a major newspaper. It routed page images to presses and generated pdfs of each page in each edition of the newspaper and made pdfs of each day's newspaper editions and published them to a static website where they were archived. I was only allowed to use perl 4 to write this software and I wasn't allowed to use a database, even though the datastructure for a day's publishing batch had tens of thousands of keys and values and required RDBMs style queries. It also features a configurable postscript parser that extracts all kinds of data from completed newspaper pages that informs the publishing system. When I wrote it I was told that it would run for a few months only while we figured out how to get a $5M commercial product to handle the work. The whole thing was written in perl 4 style OO Perl and came in at about 16k lines of code in the end -- most of the code was for the postscript processor and tons of cruft that I had to write to made a relational DBMS in memory because I wasn't allowed to use mysql. It took me four months to write it. I launched it in January of 2002 and it runs to this day. I know this because I got a call about it last month where my replacement's replacement's replacement asked me a few questions about what OO Perl is because he wanted to make a few changes. Good luck! It still runs and is responsbile for about 80% of what it was originally built to do. It is used by hundreds of people daily, who by all reports absolutely hate it. There are people working at the newspaper today that use it regularly that were not born when I wrote it. I am twice as old as I was when I wrote it. They have apparently tried to replace it several times over the last 22 years and have failed to do so... this is likely due to the blockheadedness of my old boss (who is still there) as much as the radically insane obscurity of my code, which is exactly how you'd expect 16k lines of 22 year old OO Perl 4 would be.

justusthane 2y ago
That’s a really incredible story. I’m not sure how much more you remember/are able to share, but I would kill to read a longer post about this.
- Folcon 2y ago
  It's in moments like this that I miss the hacker news magazine[0], because I had relatively high certainty that when stories like this popped up, the poster in question would get interviewed and their story would appear in the next edition. Not sure who else recalls it? Really appreciated the monthly format as well, I think summarising the last month and going in-depth on specific stories ended up being a good touchstone for what happened in the community. If anyone is interested in picking up the torch, I for one would be happy to resubscribe to it :)... -[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1261499 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1261499

aabhay 2y ago

The wayback machine is pure nostalgia. Every time I go there I’m truly amazed at what it’s like to have a society wide memory that automatically captures these different moments of our lives. Old pictures I never thought I’d ever see again. Landing pages for old companies I’ve built and only a handful of my closest friends remember. Blog posts from long deleted places, times, and mental caverns. Just incredible.

otteromkram 2y ago
I try donating every few months. Maybe $5-$10 each time. Like yourself, I think it's an incredible resource and don't mind pitching in( when I can) to help keep it running.
- Elyra 2y ago
  Same here, I have them set as my charity through Amazon smile and humble bundle
  - afruitpie 2y ago
    Amazon Smile was shut down, unfortunately: https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/amazon-closing-amazonsmile-to-focus-its-philanthropic-giving-to-programs-with-greater-impact https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/amazon-closing...
- sumtechguy 2y ago
  Hope they can last the lawsuit that is still going on from what happened with that book thing.
Scoundreller 2y ago
Reminds me of some reddit post with a link to some page with some local history, but all of the image links were broken. Within a few minutes I posted the link to Wayback and they were delighted because they happened to be archived there.
eggdaft 2y ago

calvinmorrison 2y ago

Here's the oldest i could find, still hosted by sourceforge all these years later... © Calvin Morrison 2009 https://mocicon.sourceforge.net/ https://mocicon.sourceforge.net/

Brajeshwar 2y ago

This is cool. I went there to check if I can find some of mine and found the page that links to some of my public downloads, unfortunately, none of the Zip files were archived. And the Ruffle Flash Emulator still do not work with most interactive Flash Applications!

thaliaarchi 2y ago
You might try building Ruffle from source. I’ve found that online versions don’t work for the games I want, due to using an outdated version of Ruffle.

Suppafly 2y ago

My son found some of my old java code from 20 years ago and managed to get a couple of the programs to run, with some very minor modifications. The java applets not so much, because no browser has had support for applets for a decade or so.

palad1n 2y ago
Use appletviewer. I have something from 1998 which still runs using that.
- Suppafly 2y ago
  I'll have to check it out, we spent a few minutes looking and it seemed like they don't ship it anymore, but I guess you can still get Java 8 from Oracle and it should include it.

jraph 2y ago

If you are so inclined, a decompiler might be able to "recreate" a big part of the source code. IntelliJ IDEA's one (Fernflower) works well, its fork Vineflower seems like an interesting option too. Both are released under Apache 2. Fernflower works so well I don't always immediately notice I'm debugging decompiled code.

rafaelgoncalves 2y ago
Nice, didn't know about fernflower, thanks for the recommendation! I use JavaDecompile (JD-GUI)¹ too much and is already in my workflow, but from insights like this i see some nicer/better tools. 1 - JD-GUI - https://java-decompiler.github.io/ https://java-decompiler.github.io/
- jraph 2y ago
  Seems convenient, I'll keep this in mind for whenever I may need this.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

nikolajan 2y ago

My first piece of code (substantive) was an ecommerce platform (frontend and backend). Complete overkill, and the startup was dead a year later, but the project itself was fun. Likely 15k+ lines of code, not a single unit test; simpler times :)

thrdbndndn 2y ago

>on the Wayback Machine I mean, the original MF link literally still works (I intentionally break the link in case HN filters it)[1]. > Luckily, there was [archived] from oddly recently (Jan 23 2024) You can see archiving reason on WB's index page [2]. In this case, it was archived due to "why: archiveteam, archiveteam_mediafire". [1] http s:// www. mediafire .com/file/rwpl49xusm55s2a/WordFillVer2.jar [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20240000000000*/https://download1655.mediafire.com/lbbcl7ez7adgib9-IUIf0OotUQ4kI4yMugl-Z7a2t57Sf6zL1ibXfzI6OpKsYixWErxnSa_xXvfW7VUqBTZMquQnFAxdKdhgMHDW7saQ3hopgoAbW0-Qae5nX9nbIjSjlrs595R8mCsxTh5KCv0ls3-Pizdj5ZDuPJ0Inlg2CUKDws4/rwpl49xusm55s2a/WordFillVer2.jar https://web.archive.org/web/20240000000000*/https://download...

khiner 2y ago
Good catch! I didn’t realize the original link still worked. Also didn’t know about the “why” notes on WB index. Thanks!
- khiner 2y ago
  Updated to reflect this.

haolez 2y ago

On a slightly related note, old Emacs modes (elisp) run incredibly well to this day. There might be working code there that spans over 3 decades.

Zambyte 2y ago
Lisps that support macros are pretty much infinitely backwards compatible. Even across dialects. I wrote a set of macros to be able to program in a subset of Scheme and Hylang, and run that code on either :)
- anthk 2y ago
  One guy form the PDP-10 'tribe' wrote a Maclisp interpreter in Common Lisp with relative ease. 90% of the code would still run as is, and maybe under Elisp too...

bandrami 2y ago

One of my first jobs was writing a Perl script in 1996 that did an incredibly mundane set of checks on some routers in a datacenter (using this really cool new technology "BGP") and offered essentially a public REST API (though we didn't call it that back then) you could periodically poll to see their status. Every so often I check to see if it's still there, and it always has been. I really hope it makes it to 30 years.

gedy 2y ago

Mine was from 1984, I recovered basic program from a Commodore 64 disk using a USB to 1541 controller. A character sheet creator for a "homicidal maniacs" role playing game my school friends and I created :-).

brlcad 2y ago

Boggles my mind when coders don't save everything they've ever written. It's easy to be a digital pack-rat without much consequence. That said, my first Java 1.02 programs from the 90's still compile and the old jars run surprisingly well too. Color me impressed!

ks2048 2y ago
It was quite different before the internet. I'm still holding out hope of finding some of my old BASIC programs from the 80s on a 5¼-inch floppy disk in my parents' basement. But they are probably gone.
- code_duck 2y ago
  I wish I had the Logo and BASIC programs I wrote for the c64 in the early 80s. I still have the disks, so there's vague hope. Even more, I'd love the animations and images I made on the Amiga later in the decade, but that's more unlikely.
- theanonymousone 2y ago
  > before the internet Even before GitHub, probably. Dropbox was a big step forward, still.
  - camtarn 2y ago
    Eh, not really. Even before source control was widely used by non-professionals, there was still the habit of copying all your stuff over whenever you upgraded to a newer hard disk. I've got random stuff sitting on my hard drive that probably dates to my first PC in around 1996.
- j_french 2y ago
  I found some of my first BASIC programs recently, written in 89/90 on an amstrad464. They're on cassette tape. I have a tape deck with line out, but I don't even know how to start trying to get data off an "audio" cassette tape these days? The programs weren't fancy: one was for picking lotto numbers for my mam (the national lottery had recently launched in Ireland so it was a novelty.) Also I was 10.

Takennickname 2y ago

What a strong ad for Java

dehrmann 2y ago
Java's maintained almost perfect backward compatibility. If you want code you wrote today to run in 10 more years, Java is probably the best choice. Most other languages have too much of a history of breaking changes, or if you pick C/C++, you'll have issues linking against an old UI library.
- worthless-trash 2y ago
  There are many other languages with a better lindy effect rating ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect), common lisp, erlang, fortran and more. I won't doubt how java doing well, but other languages have it beat.
  - dehrmann 2y ago
    > common lisp, erlang, fortran That's a pretty esoteric list. Javascript would have been a better choice because of widespread deployment by multiple vendors and heavy legacy.
    - worthless-trash 2y ago
      Javascript is still pretty young (comparatively) however I do believe you'd be right in saying that its likely to be around for a very long time.
      - itronitron 2y ago
        Interestingly, Javascript is just as old as Java, and Python is older.
        worthless-trash 2y ago

guessbest 2y ago

I have Objective-C software for iOS that was built for iOS 3 that still runs on the latest version of iOS and people still pay for it. Strange how language stability is an achievable goal.

kristianp 2y ago
Why don't you post the app store link? That's allowed.

noufalibrahim 2y ago

My earliest "large" program which I can remember was a drawing program I wrote in GW BASIC. You could draw figures, change brushes, I think it had a crude filling function and a few other things. In my innocence, I backed it up onto 5.25" floppy disks, labelled them neatly and put them in a box. This was in the late 1980s. Fast forward to 2024, I still have the disks but no drive to read them. On the other hand, the notebooks where I wrote out some of the routines for the programs are still with me and I can read them. Says a lot about "digital archiving".

mdorazio 2y ago
FYI if you want to get things off a 5.25 floppy, you can get a Greaseweazle for $25 and use it with any 5.25 drive. https://decromancer.ca/greaseweazle/ https://decromancer.ca/greaseweazle/
darkstar_16 2y ago
Are you me ? I wrote an exact program like this in GW Basic back in the day. I remember adding the ability to draw coloured lines but I had no way to verify since my computer monitor was one of those with green coloured pixels. Finally got to see everything in full colour at my school lab and was so thrilled. Those were the days ...
- noufalibrahim 2y ago
  Nice. I had a 256 colour VGA monitor so... :D
Almondsetat 2y ago
>Says a lot about "digital archiving" It doesn't, since you could easily buy a USB floppy disk reader
- Narishma 2y ago
  You don't have to buy anything to read the notebook though.

Repulsion9513 2y ago

> Luckily, there was one capture of the jar on MediaFire from oddly recently (Jan 23 2024). Why is that lucky? The MediaFire link is still live anyway.

khiner 2y ago
Someone else pointed this out as well - I didn't realize the original MediaFire link still worked. Updated to reflect.

sandos 2y ago

Wow, I did some work in summer 1996 in java, web applets! Would be awesome to find that again, but I think the chances are less than slim for that happening. Actually I did some somewhat impressive graphical x86 assembly programs around 1994-95 which I would have really liked to see today, but I saw no value in those once I had done them. :/

INTPenis 2y ago

I recently realized how much data the wayback machine is archiving when I found my old webpage with dozens of videos and photos of my puppies being born and they all worked.

squigz 2y ago

The Internet Archive is (IMO) one of the most important endeavours of our time. Consider donating: https://archive.org/donate https://archive.org/donate

mdaniel 2y ago
I normally echo this sentiment, and I can easily imagine an outcome through which the money could pay for lawyers, but in the ongoing discussion about their court case <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40201053 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40201053> there was a comment that predicts any money they get is just going to end up in the pockets of Hachette when they eventually lose :-( I recognize this is a very pessimistic take but ... for consideration

xandrius 2y ago

Not to be snarky but 2011 is yesterday for programming, no major shift. I'd imagine almost all code written there would be able to run today.

fragmede 2y ago
You've had a very different experience of the past 13 years if you've experienced no major shifts. Even the past year has had a whole big change with the advent of LLMs, nevermind the rise of the web, VSCode, typescript, rust, and more. In 2011, Java was on version 7. We're on 22 now in 2024. There have been some paradigm shifts in Java during that time. Streams (Java 8), Lambda expressions (Java 9), the var keyword (Java 10), Records (Java 14), switch and yield (Java 12/14), instanceof (Java 16). Functional programming over OOP; Cloud and microservices, emphasis on security, DevX, concurrency. Code written in 2011 still runs, but the world's changed around it.
- squigz 2y ago
  The rise of the web? In the past 13 years? Gosh does that make me feel old...
  - fragmede 2y ago
    Shit, I learned to program before there was Google.
    - xandrius 2y ago
      I studied OpenGL when all I could find was literally 1 tutorial on it and it was not in my native language.
    - brabel 2y ago
      Reminds of a random comment or tweet I read somewhere where the person said their young children just couldn't believe she was so old that she was born before Google existed :D they just couldn't believe her :D so cute.
  - 2y ago

amouat 2y ago

I wrote a similar program once. To get it to be efficient I had to use a bunch of heuristics including scrabble scoring words, so it would prefer words with low scrabble scores which were more likely to fit in with other words.

DrBazza 2y ago

One of my first pieces of code from my first job in 1997 still exists and runs according to a long suffering colleague that still works at the same place. That also means the code has gone from SCCS -> CVS -> Clearcase -> Perforce -> SVN -> Git. That's enterprise development for you.

eurekin 2y ago

> Download the jar file > https://github.com/khiner/CrosswordFiller/WordFillVer2.jar https://github.com/khiner/CrosswordFiller/WordFillVer2.jar Returns: > Not Found currently

danlindley 2y ago
It can still be downloaded via the file on the repo, just not using that direct link in the description. I'm not sure how the maintainer came to determine that is the link, since I'm almost certain that never would have been the way.
khiner 2y ago
Fixed, sorry about that

dolmen 2y ago

I found mine too, archived in 2001, but my browser can't run Java applets anymore. https://web.archive.org/web/20010407081008/http://www.multimania.com/dolmen/barcode/index.shtml https://web.archive.org/web/20010407081008/http://www.multim... In fact I noticed 10 years after the publishing when I tried to run the applet that it didn't even run because the compiler of that time had generated invalid byte code (not caught by the JVM) or that the source code itself was invalid and that had not been caught by the compiler. "Compile Once, Run Everywhere", they said.

brabel 2y ago
If you want to run your applet today, try CherpJ: https://cheerpj.com/ https://cheerpj.com/ This should be able to run absolutely any Java in the browser.

winternewt 2y ago

The first Java code I wrote was in 1996 (IIRC) and it is still out there, but it doesn't work anymore because it is a Java applet.

matja 2y ago
Most Linux distros still package jdk8-openjdk which has appletviewer.

smusamashah 2y ago

To author, if you use IntelliJ, you can very easily get the source back by dragging/opening compiled .class files in IntelliJ

self_awareness 2y ago

I've found some of my old .jar's (some small games) written on Windows in the 2000's. They still run on Linux 20 years later. That's why I like the JRE.

linker3000 2y ago

I found some old Turbo Pascal code I wrote in the late 1980s - early 1990s and managed to compile and run it under a DOS emulator a few years back. The code is a map editor for the Rockford ('Boulderdash') PC game. Unfortunately, the versions of Rockford in the wild, for download and online play, seem to be based on a later game engine and the map format has changed so the editor no longer works. The code was designed to produce registered and un-registered versions, but I never released it into the wild. If anyone has a copy of the original Rockford game version I'd love to know about it. https://github.com/linker3000/Historic-code-PC-Pascal-and-ASM-/blob/master/ROCKED~1.PAS https://github.com/linker3000/Historic-code-PC-Pascal-and-AS...

NovemberWhiskey 2y ago

I promise you that there are major businesses still running on Java 6 code from 2011.

oaiey 2y ago
As a dark matter architect, I can tell you: You do not need to promise. That is reality ;). You let the system run some years successfully, never touch a running system, than you fire fire-everyone involved cycle, then do something important, maybe plan the successor system and but then scrap that. And then budget is tight and the UX needs it more urgent. 2024 it is.
amne 2y ago
I don't even know what Java 6 means. Last time I wrote something in Java it said Java 1.5 compiled Java class data, version 49.0 (Java 1.5)
- wizzwizz4 2y ago
  They rebranded Java 1.x as Java SE x, then later just Java x.
  - NovemberWhiskey 2y ago
    No, it's way more confusing than that. They started with Java 1.0 and 1.1 - then to "Java 2" at version 1.2, so you have Java 2 version 1.2 ... they then stuck with that through the version after 1.4 - but rather than 1.5, that was special as it was Java 2 version 5.0 ... thereafter they're just numbered with the plain number.
    - wizzwizz4 2y ago
      So that's where the 2 in J2ME comes from!
    - hbn 2y ago
      > thereafter they're just numbered with the plain number. $ java -version java version "1.8.0_391" Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.8.0_391-b13) Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM (build 25.391-b13, mixed mode) ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

oefrha 2y ago

My first "major" program was a ASCII art based Super Mario Bros clone in Turbo Pascal from 2005. I don't have it anymore, but since Turbo Pascal hasn't changed and text terminals haven't changed, I'm pretty sure it still works.

booleanbetrayal 2y ago

Wayback machine lead me to rediscover a Doom 2 level I made awhile back [1]. What a treasure of a resource! [1] https://www.doomworld.com/idgames/levels/doom2/p-r/rurqta https://www.doomworld.com/idgames/levels/doom2/p-r/rurqta

jdeisenberg 2y ago

Plain old JavaScript (without frameworks) holds up rather well. My simplified blackjack game from 1998 (modified in 2003) and a calendar program from 2001 (probably written before then) still work in a modern browser. The calendar program uses document.write(), which is very embarrassing nowadays, but then again, that was what people did back in 2001.

jandrese 2y ago

I wrote some Hypercard stacks back in the 90s and uploaded them to AOL. A couple of years ago I found it again on archive.org complete with emulator.

alhsn 2y ago

I suggest that you reverse engineer (decompile) the jar file and check the java code too. If you didn't know, it is very easy to do.

brabel 2y ago

You can download the old Java build system, Apache Ant, from 2003 and it still runs without issue: https://archive.apache.org/dist/ant/binaries/ https://archive.apache.org/dist/ant/binaries/ Download the bin.zip distribution, unzip it, then run this comand: java -cp "lib/*" org.apache.tools.ant.Main It runs on Java 21 without issues :D. Java is like Windows: it can run stuff written for it forever.

fsloth 2y ago

So I’ve turned into an old man screaming at the sky. 2011 is not that long ago! Lot’s of production code from that time can be still considered fairly ”fresh”.

tmoertel 2y ago

The oldest thing I've written that I can still find on the Internet — the original disks are long gone — is a microbe simulator I wrote about 35 years ago. Apparently, at least two people archived a copy: https://www.macintoshrepository.org/11521-microbe-swarm https://www.macintoshrepository.org/11521-microbe-swarm I suspect that it would run as is on a 68k Macintosh emulator.

urbandw311er 2y ago

I also found mine! The first program I wrote (aged 13) was in 1991 - it was “RADBench” a program for the Commodore Amiga that created a slimmed-down workbench that lived on a RAD disk (like RAM but survived a soft reboot). Meant you could use your computer without having to reinsert the disk containing the main OS binaries whenever you wanted to do anything. I distributed it via public domain shareware listings - back then you had to send them off to a distributor and they would advertise their apps in the major computer magazines. I used to get royalty cheques in the post! Which I think I spent on sweets. Turns out most of the shareware from back then has been archived online so I was able to get it running again on an Amiga emulator and read all the immature embarrassing stuff that a 13 year old kid thinks belongs in a ReadMe… ;-)

daemin 2y ago

I've recently dug up some of my first "larger" scale projects that I implemented in the early 2000's, including compiled executables, which managed to run unmodified on modern Windows. That is an achievement in compatibility. It was 2 demos of my game engine project, one compiled in late 2001 and the other in 2002 based on the exe file timestamps. They used Win32 and OpenGL, and surprisingly work faster on my laptop with integrated graphics than on my beast desktop PC.