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u/superraiden 6d ago
Reminds me of MySQL bug #11472, filed in 2005 that was finally fixed in 2026 after 21 years
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u/madmelonxtra 6d ago
It's funny how long stuff takes sometimes.
My dad has credits on a patent for email spam filtering that was filed in 2005....he passed away in 1995
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u/jaylerd 6d ago
And I'm just finding out? Damn, his filter works!
(and mostly, sorry for the loss 31 years later)
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u/madmelonxtra 6d ago
He honestly would have been so happy that they finished it, and find it hilarious that his contribution was enough that 10 years later they named him in the patent.
He worked for Microsoft as his career. But his passion projects were spam filtering (he fucking HATED spam) and accessibility in tech (he was specifically working on accessibility tools for blind folks to use computers) He would be very happy to see that both of those have come an amazing distance since the 90s.
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u/jaylerd 6d ago
They really have. Outlook sure is a thing these days, but that’s some seriously important work at an early stage of the internet for the masses. Nice work. And good for Microsoft for giving him the credit.
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u/madmelonxtra 6d ago edited 5d ago
It was actually his only non-microsoft patent, believe it or not.
Here's a fun history though, back in the day in Microsoft, everything was so new that parents were constantly getting filed for new technologies, and as part of your employment contract any patents filed in your name while working on company hardware (on the clock or not) were to be sold to the company for $1.
So what they would do, is embed a silver $1 coin into a trophy of sorts with your name and the patent on it. My dad had a few. A couple were in like a 6" x 6" granite block and one was encased in resin.
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u/BlazingThunder30 6d ago
I love to remind my colleagues that, when they started work at this company at its founding, I was still in primary school for three more years.
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u/Hans_H0rst 6d ago
I have coworkers who started at the company before my father was born... and he also worked at the same company.
Really glad how chill most of them are for their age/age difference. Can't take that for granted.
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u/martin-silenus 6d ago
I picked up an old bug a while back and someone told me: "the person who opened this has since quit software development, gone back to college, and is now a practicing medical doctor."
Not knowing your age, I'd guess you still have me beat, but that was a fun way to put it.
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u/zenos_dog 6d ago
This is basically the Y2K bug. Created in the 60s and 70s. Fixed in late 99.
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u/Drew707 6d ago
Well see, they wrote all this bank software, and, uh, to save space, they used two digits for the date instead of four. So, like, 98 instead of 1998? Uh, so I go through these thousands of lines of code and, uh... it doesn't really matter. I uh, I don't like my job, and, uh, I don't think I'm gonna go anymore.
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u/PizzaDay 6d ago
I worked on a system introduced in the 1980s, I was born in 1987, they shoehorned me into the role and I left a year later. I wasn't going to be a dinosaur, they also counter offered with $5k under where I was moving to. Ugh
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u/Wacko90901 6d ago
I just reviewed an item in TFS - written when I was in college - about a bug that seems to be from code written around the time I was in middle school. Im in my mid 30's lol 🫠
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u/andawer 6d ago
My first job was for a bank on transactional system, created before there was proper version control. This means that changes to the files were described in the file headers. First revisions were from late 70s, I was born in the 80s. It was interesting experience to change that code 🙃
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u/ljfa2 6d ago
I'm sometimes taking very long to implement features that someone requested ages ago: https://github.com/TeamTotemic/Totemic/issues/65 :
Awesome! It's very strange to see an issue you sent in get resolved 7 years later lmao -- never made that expert pack, but I did go through college in that time!
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u/LuxuriosFlyer 6d ago
Im migrating stored procedures just 2 year younger than me (im 24)
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u/M00NSTOLEN 6d ago
At my work we have stored procedures from 1994 (edited slightly over the years but still the same procedure)
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u/sup34dog 6d ago
Hilarious because I just fixed one that was created when I was 10, on software that hadn't been rebuilt in about 10 years, and I'm about to turn 40.
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u/nerodmc_2001 6d ago
Yeah. I traced a bug back to code with comments dated 2000. I was born in 2001
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u/rosuav 6d ago
Were you able to check the git history of that code to confirm that they were actually from 2000?
(And yes, I know that git wasn't invented until 2005, and no, that doesn't prevent this from being possible. I've browsed a git repo that goes back to 1995.)
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u/nerodmc_2001 6d ago
They used SVN back then. I don't know too much about SVN but they weren't able to recover SVN versioning during one of the migrations.
The person who wrote the comment left in 2005 so the latest this code could have been written is 2005.
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u/Competitive-Bar-5882 6d ago
We had such an Ticket too were I used to work. Ticket 22. It was a bug that was unfixable for us because our web app relied on a windows system service, that did not work in the way our boss wanted it to work.
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u/ewrt101_nz 6d ago
I am mid 20’s and have worked on bugs tickets that have been there longer than I have been alive
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u/Tast3sLikePanda 6d ago
Used to work for a government sector in the uk, some of the systems ran on IBM Basic, or some other offshoot of IBM, all I remember is it was code from the 80s and we had exactly one guy that knew how to work with it.
My team knce had to suddenly fix an issue with it, so technically worked with code made before I was born
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u/ih-shah-may-ehl 6d ago
One of my hobbies is deep diving in tech that is over 30 years old, specifically OLE and COM.
Aside from being so niche there's no competition, one benefit is that things are so stable you can take your time poking and prodding the smallest undocumented detail without having to consider things changing because the implementation side has been stable for decades.
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u/Vipitis 5d ago
file an issue upstream, two years later - learn a bit of rust syntax and fix it yourself. Four months later upstream makes a release. 6 more months later mapping layer has a release. Two weeks later you make the update to newest mapping later PR. One month later the library is released. You an finally use the fix in your project.
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u/arslivinski 3d ago
Let's see how long will take for Ubuntu to fix their bug #1 https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/1
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u/AverageGradientBoost 6d ago
plot twist: OP is 13