Small Software, Long Lives

The most reliable piece of software I own was written in 1998 by a man I have never met. It has not been updated since 2004. It has never crashed.

It does one thing: it keeps a list of text snippets and lets me paste them with a keystroke. That is all. It does not sync, it does not have an account, and it has never once asked me to rate it.

It is called Clipjar. The installer is 412 kilobytes, which is smaller than the photo of my lunch I sent my sister yesterday. The help file is a single page that ends with the sentence “That is everything.” I have carried it across five computers and three operating systems, and each time I expected it to finally break, and each time it opened as if nothing had happened, because from its point of view nothing had.

Finished is a feature

Somewhere along the way, software stopped being allowed to be finished. Every product is now a service, which means it is never done, which means it is always changing, which means the thing you learned to use last year is not quite the thing you are using now.

I notice this most with small things. The button that moved. The note-taking app I paid four pounds a month for that, in the space of one autumn, added a chat assistant, a social feed and a feature called Moments that I never understood. I had to relearn a tool I had chosen precisely because I didn’t want to think about it.

That, I think, is the real cost, and it never shows up on a bill. A tool that never changes is a tool you can stop thinking about. That is the highest compliment software can earn. A hammer earns it. So does a decent kitchen knife. Very little on my laptop does.

A tool that never changes is a tool you can stop thinking about. That is the highest compliment software can earn.

Clipjar, for the record, looks like nothing. It is a small grey window with a list down the left and a text box on the right, and it holds a maximum of ninety-nine snippets. The help file explains the limit in one line: “If you need more than 99, you need a different program.” I have sixty-three, including the correct spelling of my sister-in-law’s surname, which has three vowels in a row and has defeated me for eleven years.

Who wrote Clipjar

A few years ago I tried to find out who made it. The about box gives a name, R. Halvorsen, and an email address at a university that stopped using that domain long ago. The changelog, which ships as a text file next to the program, has eleven entries. The final one, dated March 2004, reads in full: “Fixed paste into old terminal windows. I think this is done now.”

I find that sentence quietly astonishing. Not “version 3 coming soon”. Not “thank you for your patience while we improve things”. Just a person deciding that the thing did what it was meant to do and putting it down. I never found him, by the way. There are a great many Halvorsens. I wrote to two who seemed plausible and got one polite reply, from a dentist, who said he wished he had written something that useful.

A reader who works in a university library later found something else, in an archived mailing list for users of an old text editor. In 2001 someone had asked whether Clipjar could keep the same snippets on two computers. R. Halvorsen replied, eleven hours later:

It is on one computer because you are sitting at one computer. If you are at two computers you have two Clipjars. I am sorry, but I think this is correct.

R. Halvorsen, users’ mailing list, 2001

Some days that reply sounds stubborn. Other days it sounds like the most considered sentence in the whole history of the program. He had thought about what the thing was for, and two computers were not it.

The people still using it

When I first wrote a short piece about Clipjar, forty-one readers wrote in to say that they used it too. I had assumed I was the last one. Several of them had assumed the same about themselves, and two wrote back to the others, through me, which is the closest thing Clipjar has ever had to a community.

My favourite is Arnold, a retired typesetter, who has kept the Clipjar installer on a floppy disk, then a CD, then a USB stick, and now on his phone, which cannot run it. He knows this. He says it is not a backup so much as a habit, and that he likes knowing where it is.

A small, stubborn corner

There is a small, stubborn corner of the internet that still makes finished software.

• Text editors that have looked the same for twenty years

• Calendar apps with no roadmap

• A spreadsheet somebody built for their allotment association that has outlived three committees

But some of it is finished on purpose. Somebody looked at the thing and saw that adding to it would make it worse. That takes a kind of judgement that is hard to reward in a business with quarterly targets, and I suspect it is rarer than talent.

I wrote to one of these people, the author of a plain text editor called Linden that has not changed its icon since 2006. He said he gets roughly two emails a month asking for a dark mode, a plugin system or tabs. He answers all of them, politely, with the same sentence: “linden is the size it is.”

The moving spreadsheet

That allotment spreadsheet is my favourite. It tracks who has which plot, who owes what, and when the water gets switched off for winter. It has been passed from treasurer to treasurer since 2009. Each one has added a column and nobody has removed one. It is ugly, and it is perfect.

Fig. 2. Clipjar on the committee laptop at Fallow Lane. Drawing by Almanac.

I saw it in person in June, in the shed at the Fallow Lane allotments, on a laptop with a sticker on the lid that says PROPERTY OF THE COMMITTEE, DO NOT TAKE HOME. It is one file, called plots_MASTER_final_USE THIS ONE.xls. There are sixty-four rows, one for each plot, and as of this summer there are thirty-one columns.

The treasurer now is Graham, a retired bus mechanic who took the job in 2021 because, in his words, nobody else put their hand up quickly enough. He showed me round the file the way some people show you round a garden, slowly, and stopping at the bits he was proud of that he had not made.

You can read the history of the place left to right. Column A is the plot number. B is the tenant. C is the rent, which was £18 a year in 2009 and is now £42. D is a yes or no for whether they have paid. Then it starts to get personal.

Column AD

The column that got me is AD. It was added in 2021 by Graham, and it is headed Notes for whoever is next. Most of the cells are practical. “Gate sticks in wet weather, lift and push.” “Pays in cash, always on time, do not chase.” But row seventeen, a plot held since 1994 by a man named Walter Pike, says: “Walter died in March. His daughter is keeping the plot on for now. Don’t ask her for the rent until autumn, I’ve covered it.”

I asked Graham whether anyone had paid him back. He said he hadn’t asked. Then he told me that Brenda had done the same thing for his wife’s plot in 2016, the year she was ill, and that he only found out because it was written in the spreadsheet, in a cell nobody had ever deleted.

The app that didn’t take

The spreadsheet nearly did not survive. In 2018 a newer member of the committee, Owen, who works in software for delivery firms, proposed moving everything to an app made for allotment associations. Tenants could pay their rent online, and the committee could stop passing a laptop around in a carrier bag. These were good arguments, and the committee voted for it, five to four.

For seven months they ran both. The app had one field called Notes that held a hundred and forty characters and could only be seen by an administrator. There was nowhere for heavy lifting, or bees, or water butts. Graham, who was not yet treasurer, kept updating the spreadsheet anyway, because he says he did not trust anything that had never been rained on.

In the spring of 2019 the company behind the app was bought by a larger one, and the allotment product was closed with thirty days’ notice. It was Owen who proposed going back, and it was Owen who added column X, which is headed Pays online? (ask Owen). Three tenants still say they miss paying online, and they are not wrong to.

The case against me

I showed a draft of this essay to my friend Delphine, who works in computer security, and she said, “This is lovely and you should never say it at work.” Finished software is a fine idea until it is connected to anything. The world around a program keeps changing even when the program doesn’t, and some of the changes are people trying to get in.

She is right, and Clipjar is not a very good counterexample. It cannot paste accented letters properly, so the é in my sister-in-law’s surname arrives as a question mark, which is fine for me and useless for half the people on earth. The Fallow Lane laptop runs a system that stopped getting security updates years ago, and the only backup is a memory stick in the inside pocket of Graham’s coat. Neither of these things is finished, strictly. They are just not being changed, which is not quite the same.

Neither of these things is finished, strictly. They are just not being changed, which is not quite the same.

I don’t have a neat line between finished and abandoned. I suspect there isn’t one, and that the difference lives mostly in whether someone, somewhere, still knows the thing is there. Graham knows. R. Halvorsen, presumably, has not thought about Clipjar in twenty years.

Knowing when to stop

The spreadsheet is not good software in any sense a developer would recognise. It has no validation, and someone at some point typed the whole of column K in capitals. But it has done something I have never seen a product with a roadmap do. It has stayed still long enough for people to leave things in it.

I went back to Fallow Lane in September, on a grey Sunday, mostly to return a trowel I had walked off with in June. Row seventeen had changed. Column D now says yes. Column AD says, in Graham’s spelling, “Paid in full. Daughter staying on. Says to thank whoever.” He has not told her who.

This is an essay about software that is finished, and why so little of it is. It is also, I suppose, a small thank-you note to the people who knew when to stop. R. Halvorsen, if you are out there, it still works.