Still running strong after 1,532 days without a code change.
The first contract program I wrote was when I was 17 years old. I was working at a service station changing oil. Some guy comes through who wants to stand around while I do the work (it happens) so we struck up a conversation.Turns out he was a bookkeeper and had just purchased an Apple IIe and wanted to use it for his clients. I knew nothing about accounting, he knew nothing about computers, so it seemed like a good match :)Four weeks of spending free afternoons at his shop, and it was ready to go. He was happy and I had 200 bucks in my pocket. Life was good.Almost 20 years later, I get a call from him. He says the program isn't working so well and he wants to upgrade. I'm like WTF? Does anybody in the universe still even have a working Apple II anymore? Why would he keep using something like that for 20 years?He told me that as computers modernized, it became a bit of a status symbol to have an older-looking system spewing out reams of reports. His customers, who were mostly small construction companies and such, got the feeling of stability and security from something that was unchanged.It is a very strange feeling to get a call about code you wrote a long, long time ago. If I would have had any sense, I would have realized from the experience that programming is normally an extremely tiny part of actually making a business work. But it took me many more years to figure that one out.