The client has started internal projects to replace it 3x over and each has been cancelled; sum total spent on the cancelled projects easily exceeds what I charged by an order of magnitude. In retrospect I didn't charge nearly enough back then! If only I could have used a SAAS model.
After you've lived through it, a decade is a very short span of time. If you don't have to think about whether or not something is going to break, you have more free cycles to think about something else that needs doing.
That was probably my first real bit of production code, it (un)fortunately replaced half a floor of people with one man, who faithfully clicked those buttons every first midnight for the next 10 years before he retired. It was then automated by the couple of South African contractors that replaced the NYC-based app development team.
The company spent about 12 years automating away almost every job except management.
If I'm not mistaken, we even gave them our code back in 2009 or 2010.
s/for now/forever
I managed to get it running on the latest security release of 7.1 with a few days of work (I had to make code changes in the framework I used that weren't supported in PHP 7 anymore). If they want future security upgrades, it's going to require a even more significant rewrite of the software because it relies on old PHP behaviours that have been removed in recent releases.
So, I completely understand why 20 year old systems would still rely on floppy disks.
Must be some cognitive blind spot.
Did autocorrect “fix” your intentional misspelling for you?
Hehe, yeah for the better or the worst ;)
The only thing that would have been good is to know in advance which ones will last that long - one was a temporary proof of concept!
It has zero comments, the code was inefficient, the variable names are things like "theThing" (it's the best I could do at the time) and "database" is just a series of text files carefully read/written to on the disk.
In some cases we had to have contingency plans for the software and data in case the company goes out of business within the coming 15 years.
Next I worked in advertisement, where clients spent similar sums as the above for cross media campaigns lasting maybe 14 days
That was quite the interesting contrast work wise :)
That said, most of my career has been in embedded systems, so this kind of lifetime isn't really unusual.
> Because I've seen a bit of that and it's what makes the world go round. There's certainly a lot of bad/crazy stuff out there but wonder if the ephemeral fashions of today will stand the tests of time.
Not many, I'd wager. I've even seem a few people argue here (IIRC) that backwards compatibility is an antipattern, which is the thing that allows systems to function on scales longer than an ephemeral fashion.
Did that a lot when I was working at a major US bank (JP Morgan). All the critical software I worked on was planned for 10-20 years in my mind. Some of the work was upgrading/rewriting ancient things that have been there for 15 years, sometimes mostly untouched. Wrote some blog posts about it.
The most remarkable legacy system I have seen : That one was 13 years old, upgraded and half rewritten with bug to bug compatibility, 99% sure it will still be there in 13 years. https://thehftguy.com/2020/07/09/the-most-remarkable-legacy-...
Retired the last Perl software in the bank, rewrote in python and made sure it works on 2.6 and 2.7 and 3.7 to cover the upcoming decade. That software was handling in the order of a trillion dollars per day, wouldn't be surprised if it's still there in 30 years. https://thehftguy.com/2020/06/26/are-banks-still-using-perl-...
I'm also curious about the work/personal split here. I have a small handful of things at home I first wrote around 10-12 years ago that I still use and tweak, but have only been working professionally for about 9 years (and have worked on things in that time I personally fully expect to hit 20-30 years).
There's a lot of infrastructure stuff that dates back 12 years, when we standardised the entire place on ubuntu (804) for linux (and got rid of solaris at the same time).
That's all fairly new though. A lot of broadcast equipment still in use store config on 3.5" floppy disks, and I saw a windows 3.1 machine still running in a branch office about 18 months ago.
What I would claim - is that people who targeted Win95 for equipment that had to last decades never bothered to understand how software ecosystem works. They just "threw it together"...
That said - the floppy disks isn't that bad, per se. I would have expected Boeing to be smart enough to expose a data loading interface, that can read something "as if it was a floppy disk"... But then I look af 737 and Boeing's failure to deliver a crew space launch vehicle - and get reminded that they only exist because US government literally props it up.
The backend of the dmd D compiler was originally developed in 1983. Of course, it's been through a lot of dramatic changes.
I had a lot of joy recently reading the Voyager 1 image decompression routines and some X11 window manager sources.
I dunno. I could easily see taking decently made hardware to the 20 year mark.
Because I've seen a bit of that and it's what makes the world go round. There's certainly a lot of bad/crazy stuff out there but wonder if the ephemeral fashions of today will stand the tests of time.