Single-person creations that have stood the test of time?

The Clojure programming language was a single person effort in the first years and all of the design and implementation was done by Rich Hickey in the first version (2 years of work, not counting previous experience).

He was burned out from the state of commercial programming around the time and funded a sabbatical with his pension savings to work on Clojure. He had at least 3 attempts to bridge Common Lisp and the JVM or CLR runtimes and he had formed strong opinions on the need for Clojure to be hosted.

He kept up doing 90% of the work with the next few versions and even today it he calls all the shots on its development, it not being a "bazaar" style open source project. Of course it being open source anyone is free to write their own patches and make forks, but generally contributions are more likely to be accepted by the community as libraries, not language changes.

The whole story has been submitted here a few times and is quite interesting: https://download.clojure.org/papers/clojure-hopl-iv-final.pd...

An intern I met a few years back built a Farnsworth fusor while he was in high school. He showed me pictures of it in operation, complete with some really cool shots of the plasma.

It occurred to me a few years later that the helium atoms he snapped together will likely survive until they are swallowed up by a black hole or maybe have a front row seat to a supernova or gamma ray burst. So likely hundreds of billions if not trillions of years.

List of video games supposedly developed by just one person: https://www.gamespot.com/gallery/the-14-best-games-developed...

I say supposedly because I know Jonathan Blow paid someone to do all the art for Braid, and licensed all the music (I even saw him demo Braid before release with his programmer art at GDC back in 2008, it did not look anywhere near as pretty, so he made the right choice). But the artwork was so extensive I'm not quite sure that really counts for your criteria.

That may be true for some of the others in the list as well, if that's the case. Stardew Valley I know was all one person, though. Also I really enjoyed Gorogoa, even though it's a smaller game, and that was done by a single guy who quit his cushy tech job and spent 7 years teaching himself how to draw and make games before he released it. It's a super clever interactive comic panel puzzle game that was well-received, though. Think it's on Xbox Game Pass right now.

https://www.nirsoft.net/about_nirsoft_freeware.html

Tiny utilities (typically under 100 kb), no ads, available for free, and they do exactly what they say very efficiently. The site has been around since 2001.

The FreeDOS operating system [1], started in 1994 by Jim Hall. Several critical parts of the system (e.g. the kernel) were written by others, but he is still coordinating the project in 2022. They released version 1.3 just recently.

Charles Childers' work on the tiny Retro Forth language [2] is also worth pointing out. It was started by Tom Novelli, but according to interwebs, Childers took over in 2001. Really cool language if you like tiny VM-based systems and forth.

Another tiny one-man language is PicoLisp [3]. Created by Alexander Burger in around 1988, and he's still the maintainer. He has been using it in commercial application development ever since.

Today, I'm wishing a long and healthy life to Virgil Dupras' Collapse OS! [4]

EDIT:

Another project I really like is Willus.com's k2pdfopt [5], a small cross-platform tool that optimizes pdf files for mobile readers. Started in around 2011; judging by the website, very probably a single-person thing.

One more is, edbrowse, a "command line editor browser" with ed-like command language [6]. Originally written in 2002 by Karl Dahlke for blind users, but might be interesting to many others as well because of its scripting abilites.

Ah, and also mhwaveedit [7], Magnus Hjorth's wave editor, developed by him since around 2002. And Mark Tyler's mtpaint [8], which was apparently very much inspired by mhwaveedit.

A fascinating single-person made digital audio workstation is Non DAW by Jonathan Moore Liles [9], started in around 2006. I've used it a lot, great modular design, ran really well on an old Thinkpad T42.

Serenity OS [10] has also been in development for 3 years. Andreas Kling's amazing effort.

Possibly Dwarf Fortress [11] would also almost count as a two-man project, by Tarn and Zach Adams, going on since 2002.

Nils M. Holm's creations also deserve a mention for sure. Scheme 9 From Empty Space, Klong array language, several books, etc [12]. Really inspiring guy.

Not wishing to turn HN into Wikipedia, so I'll stop here. The dedication behind this kind of projects is amazing, really.

1: https://www.freedos.org/

2: http://retroforth.org/

3: https://picolisp.com/

4: http://collapseos.org/

5: https://www.willus.com/k2pdfopt/

6: http://edbrowse.org/

7: https://github.com/magnush/mhwaveedit

8: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MtPaint

9: http://non.tuxfamily.org/

10: http://serenityos.org/

11: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dwarf_Fortress

12: http://t3x.org/s9fes/

I'm surprised (or I missed some part of the entire thread) nobody mentioned Bittorrent! The entire protocol and the original client was designed by one person: Bram Cohen. Think about some of the most efficient way to distribute large data over the internet and there is one single mind behind it. Of course, there are plenty of fancy GUI-powered clients today but the very original idea belongs to one person. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bram_Cohen

The "Cat's Eye" reflector used on roads was invented by Percy Shaw [1] in the 1930s. It's arguably saved miliions of lives and is found all around the world. It is a design that's simple, passive, robust, cheap and very effective, making it one of the all-time great inventions

[1] Richard Hollins Murray contributed to the idea

Surprised no one mentioned git. Made over the course of a single week by Linus Torvalds,

Just about anything created by djb: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_J._Bernstein

Daemontools, a whole bunch of ciphers, tons of otero software. The man is a living legend.

The modern theory and application of logarithms are largely the work of one mathematician working in isolation (which is highly unusual):

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_logarithms * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Napier

Bingo Card Creator: https://www.bingocardcreator.com/

Exiled Kingdoms: https://www.exiledkingdoms.com/forum/index.php

Stardew Valley: https://www.stardewvalley.net/

Instapaper: https://www.instapaper.com/

MeetWell: https://www.meetwell.app/

Pinboard - https://pinboard.in/ is a one-man developed bookmarking/tagging/archival service that's been a consistent featureset and price for many years now without any delusions of selling out or exponential growth.

I love it and use it religiously, I just tracked down an article I remembered reading in 2015 the other day just by searching a keyword.

I'd say literature come to mind the most.

A Tale of Two Cities, Macbeth, Romeo & Juliet, Beowulf, Pride and Prejudice were the first ones that come to mind, though there are of course many more. Wish I knew more of the non-western classics

The list is massive. It probably covers most open source projects from Linux (which might not be single personal now but it certainly was when it started) and git, cURL (still single person AFAIK) etc. even GNU started out as a single person project.

SQLite by D. Richard Hipp

Tech stuff? This japanese developer that has been regularly updating his stuff for years and years. Simple. Efficient. Runs on anything. Although not super well known:

https://shirouzu.jp/

Non tech stuff? The standard design nail clipper is something probably most of take for granted. Invented by David Gestetner and used all over the world. I feel like this is the kind of thing that people might end up missing in a real dystopian mad max style world (assuming they become hard to come by). If I have to use a toe knife like the great Frank Reynolds I will not be pleased.

I'd put emacs and gcc by Richard Stallman on the list. (Obviously they subsequently grew to way more than one persons efforts.)

ColorFORTH deserves a mention, to say the least!

Chuck Moore devising his own programming language, which runs bare metal on x86 chips, in which he wrote a VLSI design program, to make chips, which run his programming language: it's safe to say this is the most control over a computing stack which a single human has at this moment in history.

Which is not to say GreenArrays is a one-man show, or detract from the hard work everyone else involved has done. I've not spoken to every one of them, but I can't imagine those I have disagreeing with me.

Wasn’t lichess developed by one person? I’m not sure how old it is but I think it “withstands the test of time” since there are few (maybe no) other places on the internet so zealously and universally beloved by users.

The lines blur between creation/discovery for some of these. Additionally, the historic nature makes it impossible to determine if these were all the work of a single individual, but I'll go with:

Joseph Shivers - Lycra/Spandex

Albert Hoffman - LSD

Anton Köllisch - MDMA (was killed in WW1)

John Pemberton - Coca Cola (significantly different to the modern drink)

John Baird Glen - Propofol

Percy Spencer - Microwave Oven

My sites https://nomadlist.com and https://remoteok.com are single person creations. And exist about 8 and 7 years now! :)

TeX, the typesetting system developed by Donald Knuth

Software is a pretty incredible industry because it allows a single person (or small group) to be responsible for something that so many systems are dependent on. Pretty incredible. Look at any modern package manager and see how many packages there are that enable massive businesses and operations that are written by one person and maybe a few contributions here and there.

It's a humbling experience to see people like that.

Total Commander - https://www.ghisler.com/

Been around for 27 years now and maintained by Christian Ghisler pretty much on his own.

For gaming the work of Chris Sawyer on Rollercoaster Tycoon is pretty interesting - entirely coded by him in Assembly. As far as I remember all of the art was also done by one guy (not Mr Sawyer). Extremely optimized programming.

https://www.pcgamesn.com/rollercoaster-tycoon/code-chris-saw...

Tarsnap - https://www.tarsnap.com/

(I cannot recommend this service enough.)

The original Linux kernel was entirely Linus Torvald's work. Also the same applies for Git. GNU Emacs was Richard Stallman entirely. Most Linux tools we use e.g. cURL, wget etc, started out as one person effort for a very long time until they caught attention.

Another way to look at it: all the tools you use now are team efforts after a lone developer perfected it to a usable release, where people were largely impressed to pick it up further.

I’m surprised Craigslist isn’t on the upper end of the comments section. It changed the way people bought things, even expensive things like cars, found jobs, dating…etc.

Fiddler...now owned by Telerik. Creator Erik Lawrence. Wikipedia link https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiddler_(software)#:~:text=Fid....

Zombocom. Anything is possible at Zombocom

Coral Castle outside of miami, one weird man's project. https://coralcastle.com/

If guns are your thing - probably most things by John Browning. His designs are basically still in use more than 100 years later.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Browning

Radio engineer and ham Grote Reber [1] independently pioneered radio astronomy back in the late 1930s by building a dish in his back yard in Illinois.[2] (Noone else who knew about Jansky's results followed up.) Tech in that day wasn't up to working at 3.3GHz, so he moved down to 910MHz then 157MHz. In 1939 he discovered Cygnus-A. In 1954 he moved to Tasmania to get away from man-made interference!

[1][https://public.nrao.edu/news/grote-reber-radio-astronomy-pio...] [2][https://web.archive.org/web/20060927053750/https://www.bigea...] (by John Kraus who ran Ohio's "Big Ear" operation)

I think of this comic which was done completely by Jack Kirby

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OMAC_(Buddy_Blank)

which has some delicious irony since it is about a "One Man Army Corps".

Kirby worked with Stan Lee and some others at Marvel comics to develop the characters and settings that set the foundation for Marvel being... Marvel. Kirby was kinda resentful that Stan Lee hogged the credits for the work. Particularly Stan Lee had a writing credit for all of the books he was involved in, but "writing" includes both planning the scenario and choosing individual words and the illustrators had a lot of input into the scenario.

Looking at OMAC you see Kirby do a really heroic job. The scenario planning is excellent and the writing at the sentence level is fine, but you can see that Lee had a special touch for that which Kirby didn't have.

The Theremin and early Moog synthesizers by Bob Moog.

SID (the sound chip of the Commodore 64) by Bob Yannes.

PuTTY - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PuTTY

The first thing that came to mind was the Roud Folk Song Index, a database of 250,000 songs all researched and compiled by a former librarian in the 70s, as a labor of love (and scholarly dedication, I guess).

And then Samuel Johnson's A Dictionary of the English Language, a dictionary researched and written by a single man. He thought it would take three years, ended up taking nine years. All the more impressive for the reckless confidence paid off by diligence.

The famous anecdote Boswell reported about Dr. Johnson's confidence in his own abilities as a scholar:

>ADAMS: But the French Academy, which consists of forty members, took forty years to compile their Dictionary.

>JOHNSON: Sir, thus it is. This is the proportion. Let me see; forty times forty is sixteen hundred. As three to sixteen hundred, so is the proportion of an Englishman to a Frenchman.

Banished

https://shiningrocksoftware.com/

One person made an outstanding village-building game that has not only stood the test of time (released 8 years ago) but also spawned dozens of imitators and a robust modding community. It's sold at least 2 million copies (based on outdated info I could find) and is frequently referenced in gaming media with the reverence of a classic.

Dust: An Elysian Tail - a metroidvania game

"Aside from voice acting, soundtrack, and parts of the story, Dust was designed and programmed entirely by Dodrill. A self-taught illustrator and animator, he had previously done artwork and cinematics on Epic Games' Jazz Jackrabbit 2, and was in the process of creating an independent animated film, Elysian Tail.[14] He assumed it would take three months to complete the game; it actually took over three-and-a-half years. He originally envisioned the game as an 8-bit-style platformer, similar to earlier entries in the Castlevania series. Inspirations for the final game came from such titles as Metroid, Golden Axe, and Ys I & II, which Dodrill cites as his favorite games."

Javascript (created by Brendan Eich in 10 days)

Cave Story, great unique platformer made by one person that accumulated a large community and ended up being put on various consoles

SpinRite - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpinRite

Everything[0], instant NTFS file search on Windows. The thing keeping me from using Linux on my main home PC.

[0] https://www.voidtools.com/

What about works of art in general ? Leonardo da Vinci, Van Gogh, Picasso, Escher, Botticelli, Michelangelo, Shakespeare, Bach, Haendel, Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, Saint-Saëns, Bob Dylan, Mark Knopfler, Bob Marley ... And so forth. All artists who created works that are still considered masterpieces to this day.

I'm consistently impressed by the stuff I wrote using the golang standard lib still running an entire decade later with only golang stdlib updates, while the stuff written with dependencies is dead

SSH - originally written by one person - Tatu Ylönen.

Rock garden in Chandigarh, India.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rock_Garden_of_Chandigarh

- PuTTY (Simon Tatham) - Bitcoin (Satoshi Nakamoto, if he's a single person) - mIRC (Khaled Mardam-Bey)

Gambit Scheme [1]. Marc started it 34 years ago and still is going strong. Recent versions has support for generating js/php/python/ruby code, but I'm not sure what the current state is. One of the most portable and optimizing scheme compilers around.

newLISP [2] is still maintained and Lutz is frequent on forum.

Kawa Scheme [3], very good optimizing scheme on JVM, started 24 years ago. Per Bothner, author, is frequent on forum, although he'd like someone to continue developing it.

PicoLisp [4], started 34 years ago. Alexander Burger is still maintaining it, latest version was 2 months ago.

LFE [5], started by Robert Virding (one of Erlang authors), 14 years ago. Still developed.

Calibre [6], started 15 years ago by Kovid Goyal. Still in heavy development by Kovid.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gambit_(Scheme_implementation)

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NewLISP

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kawa_(Scheme_implementation)

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PicoLisp

[5] https://lfe.io/

[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calibre_(software)

Hacker News, including Arc.

Not entirely on topic here but the first thing I thought of: Years after his music program called Impulse Tracker had had it's heyday, some music magazine did a roundup of various resampling algorithms and Jeffrey Lim's resampling algorithm was included for posterity and to round things out so that it wasn't all only big-money players. Names like Kurzweil, Alesis, Akai, Roland, Yamaha, Sony, Pioneer, Philips, Tascam ... but there on that list at NUMBER ONE was the resampling algorithm from a little shareware program made by a hobbyist for making beep boop techno.

(For those interested in the technical aspects of how to compare resampling algorithms, you take a sound, graph it, speed it up then slow it down, graph it again. Comparison of the two graphs would ideally be identical but in practice that's nearly impossible. Mainly you're looking for where frequencies got created that were not originally there.)

APL by Ken Iverson, as well as its descendants.

How about https://oeis.org/ the Online Encyclopaedia of Integer Sequences? It seems to have been run by Neil Sloane for maybe 40 years alone before getting a board of associate editors and volunteers, but it's not clear with a quick search exactly how long or how alone. He does seem to have been the primary guiding force for its 58 years, even with help.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On-Line_Encyclopedia_of_Intege...

https://www.theguardian.com/science/alexs-adventures-in-numb...

Bill Joy made ex, vi, C shell and much of early BSD. All of those (at least if VIM usage counts as using vi, which counts as using ex) are still getting a lot of use.

General relativity, they haven't found a dent in it yet.

Intermittent windshield wipers. Fantastically useful and co-opted by everybody who could (legally or not).

Postfix

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postfix_(software)

Seems initially the work of a single person, though I have no doubt others contributed greatly also.

Curl

Surprised nobody has said Denis Ritchie and C.

Also, the architecture of Corbosier. Lots of other examples exist in architecture.

Great question, by the way.

Anki, the very popular Spaced Repetition System is developped and maintained by one person if I'm correct.

Chris Latner's LLVM compiler. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LLVM

Literature. Pretty much all of the greatest stories ever told came from the mind of one person.

PGP

Phil Zimmerman

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pretty_Good_Privacy

Perl. Originally a single person creation. All credits to all the hard work people have put in over the years to maintain it.

Although more recently the technology has fallen into obscurity, flintknapping has for millions of years stood the test of time, far longer than anything yet mentioned here, and whether we're aware of it or not, we all owe considerably to whomever came up with it, along with the inventor of the wheel, as well as whomever developed the ancient and mysterious techniques to control, use and even create fire, not to mention, of course, whatever unknowable creative geniuses that invented throwing, food, sex, clothes, pockets, wiping the nose, wiping other things, etc. Come to think of it, there was likely a first individual that came up with adding and others for each operator, and these inventions must have occurred a very long time ago yet many still use calculation even today.

ffmpeg and qemu

Unsounded is a phenomenally nuanced and gorgeous webcomic created by a solo writer/artist. It's the only active webcomic I follow. http://www.casualvillain.com/Unsounded/

TAOCP by Donald Knuth

What do you mean by test of time?

Is this applicable to Minecraft if there is Michelangelos David, or Beethovens 5th Symphony?

Or some random tech stuff like Git if all the math is run on the shoulders of the likes of Euklid?

But to add something technical:

Nicolas Appert the guy who did canning before Pasteur could explain how it worked.

Dwarf Fortress is one person right?

The World Wide Web comes to mind.

John Sinclair (not the poet) is both the name of a German pulp horror series as well as of its main character. New books appear every week, and although initially some of them were written by others, the whole series is mainly the creation of a single author, Jason Dark. Because of his age, the series is now written by a team of authors with Dark only contributing one novel per months roughly.

The series has been published continuously since the 1970s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Sinclair_(German_fiction)

Photopea is an online photo editing tool created by a single person. https://www.failory.com/interview/photopea

Multiple monograph examples come to mind, from Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, to Gibbon's History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Alexander's A Pattern Language, and many others.

Photopea - Free Adobe Photoshop alternative.

this is an interesting topic -- I find it socially curious how some academic coders can have their name at the top of a project, as if it was solo, and then a dozen+ names listed in the "thank you" section.. as an academic outsider, I can say that there are definitely layers to the academic social norms world, where both well-spoken industrious visionary individuals, and harsh thankless abusive team leaders, can end up with "sole inventor" looking attributes even though in fact, no one does that much detailed work completely alone.

Liquid Paper[0]

It may be on its way out, now.

[0] https://www.thoughtco.com/liquid-paper-bette-nesmith-graham-...

HTOP (Hisham Muhammad)

PCem (Sarah Walker)

Probably not what you had in mind, but the first thing that popped into my mind after reading the subtitle of your post was Venus of Dolni Vestonice, a little ceramic figurine of a woman dated to 29,000–25,000 BCE. Beautiful piece of art in my opinion (although beauty standards have changed).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus_of_Doln%C3%AD_V%C4%9Bsto...

Like MS-DOS? I mean https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Paterson

Redis

Linux

I'd vote for Éric Chahi's Another World/Out of this world, Jordan Mechner's Prince of Persia and maybe Chris Sawyer's Transport Tycoon.

My jQuery Termial: https://terminal.jcubic.pl/ library. It started more the 10 years ago. It's written in ES5, I didn't wanted to do that, but I'm thinking about creating version 3.0 that would be a rewrite in latest JavaScript or TypeScript.

Richard Stallman: Gnu Emacs, GCC, GNU Debugger, GNU make.

They all started as one man projects. Then others started to contribute little, then more.

There is that guy in India who dug a route through mountains.

There is another guy who is building a castle using mostly meieval methods.

Another World/Out of this world was single-handedly built by Eric Chahi: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Another_World_(video_game). And ported to various systems. Unbelievable.

Oh Alan Adler comes in twice! He's credited for inventing the Aeropress coffee brewer and the Aerobie frisbees!

I'm shocked that noone mentioned Kent Beck and JUnit. JUnit is one of the most widely-used libraries out there.

John Resig's Jquery

Written laws - Hammurabi

Nocash set of emulators and debuggers[1], created by Martin Korth some decades ago and they'are still widely used as a decent debugger, specially when developing gb/gba software.

1: https://problemkaputt.github.io/

Finnegan's Wake.

RT-11 (a real-time, largely foreground/background operating system for the PDP-11)

I have heard that the RT-11 OS was a one man effort at DEC, which for many years was more popular than Unix on the PDP-11, but I don't know the details. Do any DEC experts know more about this?

Wordle

Transport Tycoon (Now OpenTTD) - a simulation game where you build a transportation company with complex economics, physics and other real world elements built in. If I am not this game was written by Chris Sawyer in early 90's or late 80's.

The guy is a legend.

This was probably done by just one crazy obsessive, and will likely be around for quite some time:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgia_Guidestones

Schrödinger's cat. Oh, wait. Maybe it didn't survive.

More seriously, 1) some mathematical fields, e.g. Galois groups. 2) some specific game strategies: - Bridge has the Stayman Convention (and others) - Chess has Alekhine's Defense (and others)

I’ve never hired any other developed to work on https://pollylingu.al with me, but obviously there other who work as tutors and translators

Mojang was formed relatively early on in the development of Minecraft and had a small team (and outsourced dev for other platforms) for quite a lot of it's development and obviously now is a behemoth.

Lululemon founder Chip Wilson was the inventor of Board Shorts (the shorts for surfers... he then went on to invent several other garments - then founded lululemon...

His episode on how I built this is REALLY interesting.

If you are not talking about only tech project creations, then certainly many of the great books might fall under this category, especially those which birthed new mindsets as part of their creation.

Kenshi[0] is a great example

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenshi_(video_game)

The Turing machine appears to still be in use.

The web has done alright.

There are hundreds of them.

Remind - https://dianne.skoll.ca/projects/remind/

Renderdoc is built and maintained by one guy. https://renderdoc.org/

Craigslist started as a mailing list managed by Craig.

Chopin nocturnes. https://youtu.be/wuL7UC2glJM

https://pinboard.in/ run and built by a single guy

NGINX

Rubik's Cube

I launched romylms.com and testedrecruits.com five years ago and have been running them at a steady state since.

https://soldat.pl/en/

Python and Ruby

There are a large number of prolific inventors whose technology we still use today in some form or another: There's a lovely little book "Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time" about Harrison's marine chronometer.

Others like Gutenberg's printing press, Franklin's lightning rod, Whitney's cotton gin, Jenner's smallpox vaccine, Nobel's dynamite, Edison's phonograph, etc. etc. etc. are available in lots of lists.

Probably everything Nikola Tesla did !

Bit late to this party, but Have I Been Pwned by Troy Hunt is a single person venture I believe.

Rsync -- Initial release 25 years ago

Most great artistic works are the creation of a single human: Shakespeare, Mozart, Da Vinci, etc.

I built the website builder N.nu myself in 2009. Still popular in Sweden today, 13 years later.

The paperclip? That seemed to be multiple 'single person' inventors, however.

VLC

As you named a game Stardew Valley was my first idea.

But a lot of essential tech tools, apps and libraries, are mostly one man creation (fitting in https://xkcd.com/2347/).

I think that calibre, keepassx (no longer maintained, but living as keepassxc) and curl are some examples.

Excellent thread, thanks! Elasticsearch fits the criteria, I think.

IMAP by Mark Crispin

Not a lot of people realise that Windows 1 through to Windows XP was written by Bill Gates alone from his bedroom. Wasn't until Longhorn that he brought in Steve Ballmer to help out.

zlib by Mark Adler

All math? Almost all science? Almost all art?

emacs, a lot of art including books, film, wheel, fire, some programming languages (C, Perl, Python)

Photopea - Free Photoshop Alternative

Michelangelo's David :)

curl

Unturned

General relativity

Newtonian mechanics

The pythagorean theorem

(Am I cheating?)

Tim Paterson's DOS?

I believe ImageMagick[0] fits the criteria.

There's even an XKCD[1] about it.

[0] https://imagemagick.org/ [1] https://m.xkcd.com/2347/

Does TempleOS count? I'm not sure it's been long enough but it's definitely unique.

Bayesian statistics?

https://xkcd.com/

The Sistine Chapel?

SPICE layout tool?

The overhand knot?

Notepad++, PSPad.

7-Zip, LZ4, Zstd.

Christianity

Confucius

TeX

Bash.

pinboard

git comes to mind

leftpad

qr codes

The light-bulb - Thomas Edison