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Searching for the Oldest Running Application
A columnist from InternetWeek has completed a search for the oldest running commercial software application. His results are interesting (note that he's mostly skipping over mainframe applications, just looking at PC-based apps).
Hello World!!!
note that he's mostly skipping over mainframe applications, just looking at PC-based apps
That makes a biiig difference. I'm contracted out to a bank that has a mainframe system thats been in operation for around 30 years, beating the program her found.
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
Solitaire
Life moves pretty fast; if you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it. -FB
On a 8088. It works so why change. Which is actually really true. Sometimes why do you need to upgrade to a faster computer if all you want to do is run 1 application that is simple and does the job quite well. Lotus 123 for DOS on an 8088 is quite stable and fast to. (it feels faster then running excel on a 1ghz system) The 8088 and lotus 123 is bassicly the right tool for the right job. Why complain or tinker with it.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
...reasons for why really old software/hardware is still in use today. Many people complain that businesses are using heavily outdated software and hardware. These complaints claim that using outdated tools indicates lethargy on the part of the business or organization. However, that is not always so.
Idealy, when programmers write code or engineers design systems, they do it with the ages in mind. While plenty of software developers think that code is throw-away, there are some like myself who like to write enduring code. Perhaps a lot of these ancient systems were just designed so well that their obsolescence is still a long ways off. In that case, the oldest software and hardware is probably to be the most coveted. You usually don't find systems or software today that lasts for decades (and if you're on Microsoft's leash, you're lucky if your software lasts for a year).
It'd be really interesting to see the results. Are these systems really good or are the owners just really lazy?
Join Tor today!
Yeah, that's a guy I want to be adjusting my back. Probably doesn't believe in that 'new fangled' aspirin for aches, either.
Hey slashdot community, what's the oldest program you've seen running at the office or home, not counting classic games? Personally I've been using Bank Street Filer on Apple //c (c. 1983) to catalog my game collection, just for kicks. Most of my collection is classic games, so it seems appropriate...
Dude, I think I can see my house from here.
I'm still using lharc.exe by good ol Yoshi.
The archives are a little larger, and it does not take the longer file names, but for compressing one or two files it is much smaller and much easier to use than old dos PKZip (which needs 3 much larger files to do what lharc.exe does) or any Winzip version.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Over all, the quality of modern software has gone way down so I won't be surprised if there were lots of unix based applications still running.
SPAM solution made easy: 1 spammer, 5 cords of rope, 5 hourses, and fireworks. Be creative.
In any case, a good read.
(-:Stephonovich:-)
"Who needs reincarnation when we've got parallel universes?" -Me
Jeez, at least come up with a simpsons quote if you're going offtopic. "Yada-yada, square root of a million..." See how easy it is?
Definitely the Blue Screen of Death!
I still have Windows 3.1 on a system. OUCH!
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
My father got a 286 in 1990 and had a custom accounting software package made then for his office. Cost him some 300 $ then.
The 286 was junked 2 years back but the the software still runs in the office on a pentium 100 and my computer too(as a backup). Other than bringing it upto date for y2k, the code is the same.
Well we know it's definitely NOT his web server!
I can submit Scorched Earth myself. I had totally forgotten that my PC had an internal speaker until I ran it.
my sig
Microsoft Flight Simulator: A Century of Flight.
I'd say 100 years is a fairly long-running app.
No, that just attacks web servers that haven't been patched since the 1970's
In the beginning, there was, darkness. Then came, the strangers.
Sounds like some of these places just have plain lazy IS staff. I mean, take that office still using an ancient form of Lotus notes. The excuse, "cause the mainframe can't handle uploads in any other format" or some such nonsense. You don't place the burden of old mainframe technology on the users front end.
Any large company thats been around a while is going to have a legacy system here or there, its up to the IS staff to interface the old with the new.
Reply to topic, reply to this...the buttons were so close...the offtopic was second friggin' post at the time.
In the entrance to my work, we have little pc set up running a dos based virus scanner app. It's been there for at LEAST 10 years. I've never seen a single person use it. About 2 weeks ago they FINALLY got rid of it. I have NEVER seen monitor burn that bad...it looked like the app had gone monochrome but it was still plain as day.
Finally, math books without any of that base 6 crap in them.
...which would be more-or-less equivalent to the longest uptiime, I guess.
l
http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/today/top.avg.htm
I am still running WordStar to type up my billing invoices, although I admit it is WordStar 4 rather than the original 1982 vintage PC-DOS WordStar. By the way, the Borland IDE's (Delphi, etc) were pretty WordStar compatible for the longest time, but I haven't checked lately if they still recognize all the ^KB, ^KK, and all that.
(-:Stephonovich:-)
"Who needs reincarnation when we've got parallel universes?" -Me
I read the article the other way.
I'm thinking it might be much more interesting to throw the mainframes, etc back into the fray, and find the oldest continually running app...
It just might turn out to be a copy of Novell server sitting in somebody's closet, or inside a wall...
I suppose we'd need to qualify exactly what an application is, and perhaps we'd find an example where it didn't meet the criteria when switched on way-back-when, but has had bits added to it along the way, and now does?
I did some contract work for someone (names hidden to protect the innocent) last year who was using a database package named CornerStone (I think).
This program was written by the people at InfoGames for internal use in the early 80s and then sold as a product starting in 1984 or so.
I was called in when his Pentium-class machine he'd been running dos 6.2 on died and he needed either a replacement or the program hacked to run on newer OSes. It turned out that it would not run on FAT32 or NTFS partitions, or in Windows in general due to memory handling, but ran just fine under VirtualPC 5 (MacOS X 10.2) with a <2GB partition.
Just for kicks, I moved him almost entirely over to the Mac and set up one of his Win95 machines to run it in dos-mode as a back-up. After using it for the last 15 years, I doubt they'll ever change. Inertia in the officeplace is a scary thing.
Slightly OT but can anyone else remember a typing tutor program by Microsoft written in TRS-80 basic?
I think its the first MS software I remember. The second would have been Edtasm (edit assembler) for TRS-80.
"The 8088 and lotus 123 is bassicly the right tool for the right job. Why complain or tinker with it."
I agree. However one very significant problem I've ran into with such old computers. Finding spare parts. That can consume a lot of time. Finding documentation is next in line. Finally finding people familiar with whatever old but useful program you're running.
We still support dispatching systems that date back to the late 70s. So I guess an HP mainframe doesnt count, but do the dumb terminals that have been replaced with PCs count?
PC Term or minicom or whatever dos based terminal software got shoved on there when the PC came out.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it. I know for a fact that some custom code I wrote in the early 90s is still running. It basically just printed bin labels for an inventory system.
I know it's a shock to geeks, but a commodore 64 can drive a 1200 baud serial printer just as well as a dual Xeon 2.4 with a jigawig of RAM.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
One large retail company I worked for as a DBA still used a version of well-known DOS database package which can't have been last updated any later than 1990, and was probably much older. The floor of the office dealing with their product line had an office intercom and klaxon system - so that all of the employees could be informed when they needed to quit the database software (every 10 minutes or so) because the system wouldn't handle multiple users and they needed to syncronise the managed copy with a working copy linked into the store systems. :)
I am a viral sig. Please copy me and help me spread. Thank you
unix? or DOS? ls and dir have been used for ages both on servers and desktops.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
My Mom is a paralegal and still uses some DOS word processor on an old 286 with a 5" floppy to type letters and legal stuff. She's got a PC running Windows 98 in the same room, but won't use it. She says she can get a letter printed from the DOS app (wish I knew what it was) before she can get Word open.
I've always used Macs, and tried to tell her how much easier the GUI the GUI would make everything. (Though I didn't know how to get all of her old files onto the new PC with that tiny 3.5 floppy.) Then I watched her type the 'old way' once - making selections before the screen finished redrawing, spewing out 80 words a minute and printing in a keystroke - and she convinced me. There is no point in newer software for her.
Here's a clip from the comments I found in a program to calculate Sun rise & sun set:
** SUN.C Version 1.0 Michael Schwartz December 25, 1984
I've only modified it slightly to correct for float and double. I still use it in my Home Automation software to calculate Sunrise/Sunset. Hey it works well.
Linux Home Automation
http://mywebpages.comcast.net/ncherry/
http://hcs.sourceforge.net/
I still run Quicken 5. It's a lot faster and more intuitive than the newer versions, and I don't have to deal with Intuit's new DRM and spyware. I back up the whole program and all 6 years of data on a single floppy.
Jason
ProfQuotes
Well you'd better go catch it!
n00b!
Paradox 4.5 for DOS,
Lotus 123R3 (DOS),
We had (up 'til last month) a Win 3.1 machine (a 486) on our network (Great Plains Dynamics for DOS),
and within the last 3 years have finally killed off the old Novell 3.12 servers (replaced with Novell 5 and 6).
You want old? We got old...
Well,
if you are talking about P.C. programs I nominate edlin.
Or does someone actually have to use it for it to count?
SyncSort was the first useful sort program to break the O(N log N) barrier (yes, this is possible, CS101 kiddies). This was a huge win for mainframe shops with their big tape-to-tape sort jobs. That's what all those spinning tape reels were doing on early computers. SyncSort cut days off some batch jobs.
You can buy current versions of SyncSort. The old versions for IBM mainframes are still available, and you can get it as an Active-X control for Windows. So that's a 34-year old product, little changed in decades and still doing a useful job today.
I did maintenance programming on a competitive product, UNIVAC Exec II Sort/Merge, around 1969. SyncSort was faster. They really did have a better, and patented, algorithm.
I would add that the quality of _hardware_ has decreased significantly too, which can account for a number of reboots on its own. It may be faster, but its just not as bombproof as it used to be.
In summary: There's a bunch of people out there who either were too poor, to cheap or never needed to upgrade their software.
I debugged an DOS/Informix 1.0 system for a shop on Wall Street this year. Did I like it? A bit. But only because it was *new* to me. Teh guy who built it hated it so much that he wouldn't take money from the company to maintain it any more. And with good reason.
Is that really intresting to anyone? Maybe only for nostalgic technophiles with good fashion sense....
Remember, only in the Western world is software/hardware cheap when measured against the cost of living.
In India, for example, a cheap PC would cost more than what most people earn in a month. I bet there would be many schools and homes with old PCs and software simply because it costs too much to upgrade.
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What a way to spend the holidays. I don't think I could stand the excitement...
As long as you keep up with regular maintence and run the same programs, there is really no need to upgrade. If a program ran good and stable 20 years, excluding any hardware problems, it should run the same on the same old machine. Why waste money just to get a fancier, more appealing interface and countless, annoying, useless options that will never be touched.
Plus they just don't make them like they used to. I have seen many modern pentium based system come and go (and get chucked in the dumpster), while the 286, 386, and 486 systems still go strong.
It's not the oldest, but I still put Norton Commander for DOS (circa 1989) on boot floppies. A two pane file browser, an editor and lap-link file transfer in under 80K.
If I still had an older version, it did most of the same stuff in about 53k. it was from around 1985.
Competition Good, Monopoly Bad.
Ok I was going to use my final moderator point on this but i found far too many offtopics for me to do it. I do belive the longets running application they are looking for is the LONGEST STILL RUNNING from start to today. Like uptime but just a single application. :)
There was reciently the longest running computer hunt and now i suppose they want the longest running application. Im sure its going to be a database or a print or file server of some kind but you never know, someone may still have Word running and they never quit it on their dos machine 10 years ago
I'm sure theres still really old applications in use today but its unlikely they have been running all this time.
People, Please read the article before you chose to reply.
One reader sent me screenshots to prove that his Windows NT v4 server is still up and running of 1,079 days with nary a reboot, and being used to serve up IP addresses for about 3,500 client workstations.
Just the far end of the bell curve? A quick photoshop job on the screenshots? Or... maybe Windows is of some use as a server OS after all?
I am a network consultant, and there are still dozens of 3.2 servers in Omaha that I support. These servers are the most reliable you will ever see, with most of them have over 3 years of uptime without being downed once.. and the last time they were down was because a tape drive failed or another hardware component needed replacing. Netware 5.x/6.x isn't quite as stable, but I'd still but it up against an MS box any day of the week.. Its a shame that developers keep going away from it.
Most mathematicians and computer scientists use a program called TeX to typeset their papers. TeX takes a .tex file as input and spits out a .dvi file, which can be postprocessed by drivers to produce PostScript or PDF files. TeX was written by professor Donald Knuth of Stanford University; the current version is still essentially similar to the 1983 version!
TeX has a horrible syntax and funky limitations, but there are so many available packages for it (such as LaTeX and the associated packages) as well as external applications (BibTeX) and tons of mathematical files made for it that it just cannot be replaced.
Some crazy people even use TeX to
typeset a newspaper and a personnel directory.
I would be more interested in the application with the longest uptime.... that is a GOOD application.
I aint rebooted that thar database in pert-near 15 years
I'm Irwin Taranto, and I'm craaaaaaaazy!!!
The idea was that he was going to sell you floppy disks (5"? 8"?) at these prices that were so low, it meant he must be insane.
Well years later, in my senior year in college, I had a roommate named Roger Taranto. I never connected them until one day he mentioned his dad's name was Irwin. I immediately looked at him and said, "I'm Irwin Taranto, and I'm craaaaazy!" That was his dad.
I didn't know that Irwin Taranto had been a software developer as well as selling floppies.
Find free books.
I did some work for a law firm a few years ago. They were using an MS-DOS package called "Juris" to handle all their time billing. As you can imagine, this was the #1 priority mission-critical application for them. Juris is allegedly the 800 pound gorilla in the legal sector.
IIRC, Juris was written in 1986, or something like that. The company that makes it was getting ready to roll out a "test" version now featuring - WINDOWS support. *Gasp!* This was a few years ago.
I wager that the oldest running application is probably in a factory somewhere, producing something very low tech. Like an 8088 hooked up to a lathe trimming brown rubber toilet plunger bulbs. Those manufacturing guys rarely upgrade, and arguably never need to.
THIS SPACE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK.
so it can read email.
Somebody from INRIA (a computer science institute) told me that their accounting services run an old COBOL program to process the pay. The engineers who wrote the code are now retired...
Have you tried 7zip yet? Freeware and handles long file names in dos + has a nice gui version that will handle rar, zip, and lots others.
Steven V.
I patented screwing your mom. But it got revoked for "prior art."
i want to know who the oldest living slashdot poster is ;-)
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
System emulators are going to be more and more necessary to run these legacy applications that can't run on new hardware anymore (for whatever reason). Maybe this was why Microsoft snatched up VirtualPC as a way of maintaining their user base by allowing them to run the latest hardware and software as well as their older software in an emulated, but still very usable, mode.
What exactly do you mean by "Don't touch this button?"
My oldest still running apps are embedded in products that were introduced in 1983, performing oil and gas well monitoring and control. Solar-powered, Z80 microprocessors, deployed waaay out in the middle of nowhere. I suspect this code will continue to run until the hardware fails or the well runs dry.
But, how old is Visicalc for the Apple II IIe or even I - wasn't it the first app for the Apple or maybe Turtle?
I believe the date for these programs would be 1977. (Visicalc 1979)
I know of several college professors at Clemson that use Apple IIe's for milk volume analysis and "calling" the cows in for milking at the Lamaster dairy Agricultural arm of Clemson too. I also know one professor that still uses VisiCalc.
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
This was 1994-ish and the IT guy there told me that they had been running that thing for about 7 years. That means it had been in use since '87 or so.
About four months ago I got an email from one of my old subcontractors, who is now employed full time at that hospital (which is not small anymore). His note was unrelated to this application, which I did not touch or otherwise use. He was asking me somethng about one of the other systems I did work on there. But he mentioned it in passing, and I just remembered when I saw this article.
So that means that they've been using it for the better part of 15-16 years.
When you're third world, you tend to keep stuff around until it breaks =)
I have an ancient Abacus that was bought from an medievel marketplace - and I still use it to do my business tax!
I am a filthy pirate.
do I feel old at the mention of "PIM"...those were gaining popularity when I got into computers (1993'ish) while in college.
About 5 years back (maybe longer) I worked for a company that moved off an HP 1000 for their cad/cam and accounting/payroll for the sewing plant.
Know what finally did the HP 1000 in? Not backups, not parts, not software or ability to function...but politics!
(sigh) {
Was a few more paragraphs that got eaten from clicking a link in my mail client...frack! grrr!}
.
Have you read the moderator guidelines? Well, have you, PUNK? (and I want a Karma: Gnarly option)
Speaking of "oldest" tech things...it would be interesting to find out what the oldest telephone number in continuous use in the US is or the oldest email address.
I know someone who still does word processing on an Atari 800... :) She's using it to write the manuscript for a book that will be published. That's probably older than most other things, but I don't know when those Atari 800's first came out.
Best. Comment. Ever. Enjoy!
Sometimes, it really does amaze me that the computer industry is so worked up over what to do with recycling of old systems and all the computers getting thrown in the garbage - yet they act like getting more use out of the older ones isn't possibly an option.
I'm currently working for a small company that reclaims and refurbishes old Apple Mac systems (everything from the black and white 9" screen SE's and Classics to the first generation of PowerMacs). People give the things to us for free all the time, since they're written off as useless junk. In fact, we're able to get them configured as pretty nice little "starter" systems for students, small children, and public-access machines for the elderly in retirement homes.
Some of the best "classic" games and educational titles of all time ran on these computers, and there's no reason a 3 or 4 year old kid today won't find them just as exciting as kids did back when these machines first came out!
Remember Oregon Trail? How about KidPix, Print Shop Deluxe, Lode Runner, Prince of Persia, and all the Scholastic educational games/software?
For the older folks, there's plenty of great freeware and shareware: monopoly, GNU chess (who even needs a color screen for chess?), backgammon, card games, Shanghai (the matching tile game), and much more.
Claris Works runs quite well on the old Macs too, and gives students a real inexpensive solution for typing papers, not to mention simple spreadsheets.
At some point in time, I plan on putting together a nice system build for old DOS machines too, full of kids' games and educational titles - and see if we can't give some old 8088's and 286/386 machines a new life too.
Those old systems were built like tanks compared to what's offered today. Look at how heavy a real IBM keyboard (or machine) is! Small children aren't going to break one of those as easily as they will some cheap eMachines mini-tower.
Scientific Computer Applications incorporated out of Tulsa OK might be a candidate. They handle the MCS coutouring program and this is still one of the best applications of its type even today. I am pretty sure it was available before 1969. I tried to call then to confirm the date of its first release but they were not in. Friday aft - go figure eh?
In India, a cheap PC costs more than the average Indian makes in a year.
Average yearly per capita income ~ $400.
There are LOTS of examples of computer software that has been running for over 30 years.
I personally inspected some code written by my (now retired) boss. It was written in 1966. It still runs today.
No, it isn't pretty code or in a pretty language. But it works. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
On another note, I powered up my olod Tempest console the other day. 1981. Anyone have an old ColecoVision? Atari?
I think KeyKos used to claim that they had the longest running process. Of course, this isn't fair, because their processes can outlive power and equipment failures. Still, interesting and relevant.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
First find the oldest running hardware platform, then you might find the oldest software.
I would think that NASA use some very old hardware and software.
we have an invoicing program (DOS) for a garment business from around 1987. to this day, we still use it but have subsequently moved on to a window's based program. this DOS program now runs on wink2k boxes. i had to modify the autoexec.bat and config.sys files for it to work. LOL it's a pretty solid program... we have less problems with that one than we do with the windows program. (prob due to less features and no 'window's programing...) (now i'm reminiscing about the old DOS days.. mmmmm..) -armus
It still works, and its spreadsheet easily uses relative cell references. That nifty little feature seems to have gotten lost in MS's spreadsheets between then and now. Today, one of my cow orkers needed to do something in a spreadsheet ... ``relative references!'' I told him. Half an hour later, none of us could figure out how to do it in Excel.
Sometimes, the old stuff is good enough to warrent putting up with its limitations. In this case, maybe not. But MS's spreadsheets have gone way downhill since the early '80's.
See what I've been reading.
A few years back, I worked on (replaced a failing HDD) on a fax-back system. You know, you call in, enter the number of the document you're requesting, put in your fax machine's phone number, and it faxes the document to you. You see this sort of system in the insurance/legal/medical field, anything that's very paper-intensive.
Anyway, the system was from about 1978 and it was running CP/M. That's as old-school as it gets for me. Come to think of it, I was probably writing my D&D Character Generation program on the VIC-20 around the time that fax system was installed.
There is the UK air traffic control systems, which were based on 1960-era systems. ;-)
This doesn't quite count as they were replaced by new state of the art systems last year. I hear that they may even have finished debugging the new systems
It may not be the oldest, but it was a very popular terminal emulation/file transfer tool back in the day. I still think Kermit may be used by some sysadmins and folks on modem based connections (although kermit has a lot more features).
I migrated my last NetWare 2.2 client late last year (still on the original 286 hardware). Surely someone is still running NW2.x somewhere!
the no
That must be the longest running application. Also the longest running operating system. And web browser, file manager, ... the list goes on and on!
I once had to show up in a chocolate factory where they were running some old Citrix server on NT4 terminal server edition, with some old industrial server serving a special serial interface for packaging boxes onto a pallet and wrapping the whole stuff in plastic. The hardware problem was pretty interesting as the chips the stuff was running on were actually some 6502 and some old UARTs I remember vividly to be found on old ISA serial cards. I luckily had one of these in my stocks, coming from ole Amiga days. A few solder operations later, I turned on that old box, and lo behold, it was running CP/M, with a copyright notice from 1982. I asked the guy in charge if he was not afraid the hardware would break one day and that it would be irreplacable. Upon this question, he lead me down into the cellar and showed me five fresh PCs of the same time, with the batteries removed so they could not leak! They were still on their first industrial 6502 controller box!
Novell has not moved away from IPX. It has been and still will be supported in future versions. I'm teaching 6.0 and it still uses IPX/SPX for several functions. They need an admin with a clue!
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
I have a client that is still running the Personal Pearl database program. He started with it on CP/M Morrows, and now is using the DOS version on multi-user DR-DOS (About a seven person office). Client? Hell, I still use it from time-to-time since it is so easy to set up a small relational DB for a small use.
Personal Pearl was developed by PearlSoft, which was bought out by Aston-Tate, which was bought out by Borland...
"60% new code!"
If he's allowing software which has seen some ( minor ) updates over the years, there are some FORTRAN engineering apps out there which have been in use for several decades and are still used... by no less than the FCC and engineering firms.
I have printouts of engineering programs which are dated as early as 1976, and I'm sure the programs predate that by quite a few years. I have the printouts because I mantain and support the newer versions. And yes, I do know for sure that these programs, while modified and ported to run on modern hardware in modern software environments ( think OS X, RedHat and Solaris ), still closely match the mid-70's versions... and they are of course still in use.
the reason? they work, they are efficient, and they are what people doing the work are used to using. Also, simple FORTRAN is remarkably portable... and yes, I'm working hard to replace all that gnarly old FORTRAN code, but it'll probably still be online years from now, if only for reference...
After much pain, consternation, and gnashing of teeth, I have finally got my WindowsXP box up and running... Let's see, I've been up without a crash for the last 2 hou
it seems that the latest programs are not necessarly better. Who rembers running Wordstar on an 8bit system using CPM ? (64k Ram , but only 56K for programs)
Diplomacy is the art of saying "Nice doggie" until you can find a rock. Will Rogers
I heard that the new Word Perfect has an emulation mode to use the old WP 5.1
Then we found out that you really had to have WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS. You know, the one with the blue screen and a slow, VGA-based preview mode.
Of course I didn't know then how in the world you would even acquire a legitimate copy of that. Or even if it was possible.
This definately is not the oldest running software, as it was written only a few months ago, but it surely makes old hardware useful in a "modern" sense: The Contiki desktop OS for 80's 8-bit microcomputers like the C64, the 8-bit Ataris, Apple ][, etc. It features a full Internet suite, complete with TCP/IP stack, web browser and web server! Wonder what the world would have looked like if we'd had software like this back then...
They also used a 40+ year old measurement microphone to calibrate it.
burris
I recently bought a 286 PC on Ebay. It has a hardware card for controlling racks of slide projectors. (Remember those old bajillion projector slide shows in the '80s? I still make those.) The software that drives the card (VER5 from AVL) is from September 1981.
Unfortunately, I have since discovered that nobody sells 5.25" floppies any more. Good thing there's 30MB left on the hard drive. That should last a lifetime!
screenshot of something not real old... 1987. Still works.
I have an old DOS game InterSex. It's set up like Monopoly, but you get to perform a sex act at each stop. At the start, you specify how many male, female, gay, straight, and bi. It's for the Hustler crowd.
It's campy but fun. Ran on version 2.11. A mouse, nah, your hands are already preoccupied.
I've interned at a defense avionics company that does electronics for military aircraft. They were still using a program written in assembly that would decode maps shot from spy planes or satellites or whatever. The documents I read told you how to use it and those had some screenshots, with dates from the mid-70's in them. They're still using it now.
I had to hack a program a while ago, which was the main database program of a psychologist my father knew. The guy who made the program died right after the first rerun of dukes of hazard.
It took me more time to access the 180kb 5.25" disk than it took me to fix it using a hex-editor and changing the values for their adress and phone info.
Back in the 1980's, I wrote a few programs that performed back-office calculations for a major Wall Street brokerage firm. The earliest of those ran in (??? ZDS ???) Basic under CP/M on Northstar Horizons. Those programs were used daily for many years, possibly into the 1990's. If they had held on a bit longer (and thank goodness they were retired and replaced by modern tools), but if they had, they might have been in the running. Interesting days, back then.
what about the computer with the longest uptime ever (both still running and longest that isnt still running)?
The situation I always like to bring up is libraries. A perfectly aceptable method for doing research that worked for year and years was card catalogues and physically searching through journals. You can still do it, there is no reason why it doesn't work. However, it is MUCH more efficient to have a computer do the search for you, and better still if the whole journal is electronic so you can do full text searches, and just download the article straight to your computer.
Our university has done this. The physical card catalogue has been completely eliminated, all searches are electronic now. Also, while there are still floors of physical journals, many of the popular ones are available in PDF format for download.
It is amazing how much more efficient it makes research. It's even better because I can tie it in to databases of things that aren't even contained in this particular library.
Some times people get so caught up in the fact that the way they do something "works just fine" that they miss the fact that there is a much more efficient way to do it.
It is not running the software, but I am stil intermittenlty patching code whose copyringht statement at the head (written by me) says "Copyright 1984. We still have users of that software, they still find bugs with new hardware, we still fix them. Admittedly, that 1984 software is not much in use, but 1994 software is still definitely mainstream support (the article regards Win98 as incredibly old).
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
PRAY_WE_GO_THERE:
MOV _PTR_INCMING_SOVIET_WARHEAD_CNTR, A
MOVB (A), B
TESTB B, B
JE PRAY_WE_GO_THERE
CALL _RETALIATE
RET
...going into radio Shack and typing
:
/r
10 Print "Shit!";
20 Goto 10
and walking away.
later, that evolved into:
10 Print "Fuck You!!";
20 y$=inkey$:if y$="" OR y$"" then 10
which basicly grabs the 'break' from the buffer before it can be processed, requiring a reboot to clear.
Adding the line (before executing)
basica fuck.bas
to the autoexec.bat ran the program from boot.
Truly evil, we were.
Truth isn't Truth - Guliani
65 lawyer firm.
So why are we using WordPerfect?
Simple answer: Bills. The 20-year old accounting system and the groddy macros used to create the client-specific bills requires it. (All other documents are produced on Word 2K)
With the rollout of a new accounting system the need for WP will be gone and 60 legal secretaries will sigh in relief.
If you don't want to repeat the past, stop living in it.
...has to Liesure Suite Larry!!
Sigs are for hypocrits
Bank of America (used to be SeaFirst) here in Seattle still has some branches with Mac toasters on everybodies desks. Everybody is hard at work and has external drives underneath them. I can only imagine they either use some priprietary software or just use them for terminals.
is the best there ever was, beats anything today, if'n it could handle today's drives.
Have a copy of a great PIM, InfoSelect by Micro Logic, version 2. Has an astonishing number of features, runs on 3.3 DOS, and fits on a 5 1/2 DD floppy!
I used to spend HOURS playing load runner on my Apple IIC when I was a kid! That game was awsome.
The truly obsolete are likely not to be online. If they're still using... Say original Lotus123 or something older, it's likely that they are keeping what works, but may not bother reading e-info.com. How do you reach out to them? Massive newspaper classified ad campaign? Radio advertising? Maybe we should put the message on Pogs or Burma Shave signs.
Assembly is the reverse of disassembly.
My original 1978 copy of Draw Poker! for the Commodore PET 2001, still works on my PET.
Since the tape came with the PET maybe this is a rare orginal software & hardware combo LOL.
I bought a Mac SE a few years ago just to run Hypercard. I've got 2.2 and still have the floppies. 1993
Never did get around to doing what I planned with it.
I still play Nuclear War (1989) and I think Project Space Station (1987) was one of the best strategy games ever--a precursor of RTS. But I am addicted to multi-tasking and I am quite fond of the research efficiency gains you point out.
Most people don't need to upgrade and become a slave to hype. I'm running everything off a 800 MHz system (4 years) and I intend to squeeze the last drop of energy out of it(8 years or more). I'm not on a more modern system or OS because Mr. Bill Gates slammed the door on my Dragon Dictate system... a 1997 discrete speech program that doesn't get along with XP.
Why would people upgrade these days? High quality RAM, a decent video card and a decent hard drive will handle everything for people that don't give a flying fsck about games and are mature enough to just stay put. I'll probably get a flat panel monitor within the next couple years but that fits with one of my subobjectives--don't get a PC that consumes so much power that it burns my house down.
Laws are for people with no friends.
Don't you just love websites like internetwk.com? I'm looking at a 19" monitor running at a resolution of 1280x1024 and all of their story is WAY over on the left 1/4 of my screen! What kind of lame-ass webmaster do they have? Get a clue, dude; not everybody views the world at 800x600.
People who like the ability to tinker with formatting codes in WP will probably LOVE to use LaTeX. At least that's how it's happened for me. I used WP5.1 on DOS (on a 286) for a long time, then had a brief interlude with Windows 3.1 Word 2.0, until finally discovering the joys of Linux and LaTeX.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
Well, it's not me, it's my dad, but he bought an Apple //c for his real-estate office in 1983 and still uses it to keep track of the rental properties he owns.
My wife and I figure that a fairly simple spreadsheet would probably do the trick these days, but he won't part with it. As he argues (and I can't find fault with it, really), it works, so why mess with it...
I'd have moved him to AppleWin long ago if I still had the bits and pieces I needed to transfer the disk images, but alas...
I'm sure lots of PC apps still work, but then again, the PC architecture hasn't really advanced in that time.
Here at my job, we have such a mixture of different computers dating from the '70's to just two months ago. To squeeze every possible bit of value out of the money we spend, this company has never put a computer out of commission, partly because doing so could wreak havoc on our system, considering how ad hoc it is, characteristic of things that started out small and then grew, and grew, and grew. That's how our network is... and nobody around here is brave enough to make drastic changes.
Besides, we've got a huge investment in various software packages and custom programs that translate data between them. These run on so many different hardware configurations and operating systems that it isn't even funny.
In fact, the way some computers are attached to each other is funny... there are the old coaxial cables, there are newer cat5 cables, there are RS232 cables and "LapLink" cables. Hell, there are even little boards that one of our guys here built in his garage some years ago, to get some of our older dinosaurs communicating. Each of these things was put into place one by one, to solve a very particular short term problem, each turned into a very permanent part of our organization, and all are still functional and are being used extensively.
There are a bunch of newer boxes here, made out of computer scraps that people have "donated" over the years, running Linux, and in my spare time I like to write scripts to automate all kinds of repetitive tasks. I like the way our network is because it gives the thing a lot of character, kind of like old towns have, as opposed to cities that are engineered onto a huge grid. And I like to think of this network as a town in the wild west... It's so much fun to screw around with these petty things, but then, we all bring our junk cars and old hot rods into work on the weekends to fix them, or to take parts off and sell them; we all have this way of doing petty little shit all the time, and believe me, we love every moment of it!
I do. I remember typing assignments on an Epson PX-8 with that, with an 80x8 screen. I often look back on it, and I think I would prefer using the PX-8, except it can't do TeX.
Dbase3 can't even deal with years. And NO ONE ever gets paid more than ONCE a month in Dbase's world. :)
If we ever turn on our annuls experiment, the code was written mostly in the 70's-80's. Should still work. I think it's all in a drawer full of punch cards. It worked when it was last used and has been kept in condidition.
-=fshalor
Damn right. LaTeX is king. It wouldn't be very hard for someone to write a medical package or a legal package, either. I don't use Word at all anymore since discovering LaTeX.
A small, private school I support is still running Apple ][e's with some reading software on them. Luckly, my boss is an Apple packrat and has greedily collected any old Apple (Mac or what-not) that the local public school system has gotten rid of.
:(.
Personally, I have a Mac Plus (1 MB RAM) running Minix, booting off of an old 20MB drive. I fire it up from time to time for fun.
My Quadra 650 (64MB RAM) is still fired up to scan things. This machine has been rock solid, running my orginal copy of Photoshop 2.5, Quark 3.11, Illustrator 5.5. I have a customer that runs an identical system to put out a 50 page monthly newsletter. He doesn't see any need to change things.
In the closet is my Ti 99/4A with 16k of RAM. The cassette player still works with it and I've loaded up a vector drawing program I wrote in basic (enter x,y screen coordinates for line end points). I used this to draw ships for Traveller. I also had the obligatory character generator for both D&D and Traveller. It's been about 4 years since I last ran this stuff. Hope it still works.
Current Mac is a 5 year old beige G3 that's been upgraded to a 450MHz G4, dual video (20" Colorsync's) running the latest OSX. Nice that the old hardware holds up so well. Have started looking for a G4 AGP board for my next machine, though. Quartz extreme only works on AGP cards
I drank what? -- Socrates
I was until recently charged with, albeit rarely, running a FORTRAN insurance claim reserve accounting program originally written in 1961. The only major mod was a conversion in 1984 from card to tape input.
Apropos of the Leo mentioned in a previous slashdot story.
I saved this post from alt.folklore.computers in 1998. Terribly impressive. I'm not sure his age estimate is neccessarily accurate -- the final incarnation of the Leo ceased to be manufactured in the latter half of the 60s, so it may be a bit younger.
On the other hand, I wouldn't put it past some organization having been forced to make something like the orange leo y2k compliant.
Yours Truly,
Jeffrey Boulier
From: Deryk Barker (dbarker@camosun.bc.nospam.ca)
Subject: Re: Multics
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers, alt.os.multics
Date: 1998/11/09
Peter H. Coffin (hellsop@execpc.com) wrote:
: Barry Margolin wrote:
:
: > For that matter, how many portable OSes have been implemented by *anyone*?
:
: The most current OS/400 (v4r3) will still run programs compiled on the
: System 38 tranparently. That's 10-15 year old object code over at least
: one complete architecture change. The machine also has a history of
: being able to run in System 36 mode, over that same architecture change.
:
: I'm not sure if that counts as a ported OS or not, and I do work for
: IBM, so I'll stop now...
Peanuts.
When my wife was working for Honeywell, in the 1980s, one of the
customers she had dealings with was British Telecom.
BT, at one location, had what they called the "orange Leos".
Now, for those who don't know this, the LEO was the world's first-ever
commercially-oriented machine (1951). Even more amazingly, the Lyons
Electronic Office was designed and built by the J Lyons company,
best-known as manufacturers of cakes and for their nationwide chain of
corner tea shops.
Anyway, an "orange Leo" was an ICL 2900 mainframe (they came in orange
cabinets), emulating an ICL 1900 mainframe, emulating a GEC System 4
mainframe emulating a LEO.
30+ year old executable code over 3 architecture changes....
This kinda makes DOS the champion. Even todays BIOS updates are distributed on DOS floppy disks. Care to buy a tokenring card made in 2003? The driver disk supports DOS among others.
Before DOS there was BASIC, but BASIC programs unfortunately werent interchangeable much. A commodore64 program wouldnt run on a BBC. DOS and the x86 architecture were the first hardware and OS standards that crossed the threshold. Today, Intels releasing the Itanium, but making sure the 32-bit x86 emulation works well. Microsofts releasing Windows 2003, which will still run DOS apps.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
I can see it now. Lawsuites, all over the place. "They forced me to upgrade my software, and therefore my hardware by officially proclaiming my software the oldest...it was so embarassing" "They required us to change to newer technology. New operating systems *cough*tryingnottosayit*cough* new coke vending drivers, new everything! It cost my company millions in productivity." "I walk down the isle of cubicals and all I could see was solitair! It's horrific! Before it was too inconvenient for the employees to lay the cards out on their desktop, but now they have more pixels!" One satisfied employee: "u c the pc wuld crash 5 mins after i load my programs anywho. i'm better playing solitair. watch my time go DOWN!!" This is a sad state in corperate affairs..
Vehicle Stars used car search is my current project
IEFBR14, the program that does nothing.
Imagine my shock when we received a call the other day from a manufacturing plant in Tennessee to ask if we could repair their old PDP/11+RA81 (a huge ~300MB hard drive) system. The worst of it was that my boss ran in back and pulled out two working spares!
It's not the oldest, but for me one of the best DOS programs ever created. It also was the inspiration of the really only useful work (YET) of M. de Icaza.
Finding the oldest mainframe app still in use would be very difficult. I first learned to program on an IBM 360 mainframe, back in the 70s. (This platform still lives, both as backward-compatible IBM systems and as various emulators.) I seem to recall that the most widely used interpreter for the 360 was a program that emulated the IBM mainframe that dominated the business market before the 360 was introduced. Presumably there was a nested interpreter for the platform before that. It would not suprise me if some machine language program hand-coded by Grace Hand or Alan Turing is still running somewhere, in nested-nested-nested compatibility mode.
While only reading the headline, and not the exchange, I was sure the winner was going to be the Internet, although the change in name from "ARPANET" to "Internet" might disqualify it in some minds...
After all, the whole of the network, per se, was never to my knowledge, entirely offline all at once(although my memories of the first Great Internet Worm are dim, and might be misleading) and if one has a broad view of "application" wouldn't the tcp/ip suite of protocols and the protocols built on them conceivable as a single application or set of applications, whose person is to communicate(aka exchange information, whose value is arbitrary) ?
Thoughts on this, if constructive, appreciated
How about 'sh'?
I remember seeing a mainframe software that was written in 1975 that was still in production use as of 2 years. It passed all y2k test that the company had enlisted.
IEFBR14. It's almost 40 now, and it's executed
millions of times daily in thousands of companies.
Hey, I am still running Windows 2000 on my laptop.
It's so old and slow you cannot believe it. It has been running for over 1 hour now without any errors!
Oh, you mean older than that?
I think I'll have to duck now.
Before joining the 200? version convention, MSC.Nastran had versions in the low 70's
A Novell 1.0. Instructions and all. It has a new-fangled 3.5" floppy also. Any buyers?
Emacs is at version 0.21.something now.
They just removed the leading zero major a few releases ago since people had a tendency to assume "minor" upgrades weren't important enough to download.
was first implemented in 1974! It runs on an IBM mainframe on Adabas/Natural and is a mission critical system for tracking discharges from industrial facilities into streams. It also tracks discharges from municipal waste treatment (sewage treatment) plants.
As a Middle School computer teacher, kids still love the old oregon trail game by MECC. I remember that one from my Apple ][+ days as a 7th grader. Ahh... the classics.
DT
Is this thing on? Hello?
According to their website The Sisters of Mercy still use ruggedised portable 486s running DOS 3.3 and Voyetra Sequencer Plus to power Doktor Avalanche for live shows. Sequencer Plus was first released in about 1987. They claim it's only crashed twice.
I have some statistical and optimization routines written for it back in '81 and '82 that I still use. Deep down it's a toy, without a lot of the things that would be needed for a commercial APL, but contemporary processor speed and memory size makes it a toy on steroids capable of some fairly serious number crunching.
For those of you not familiar with APL, it has been described as "a mistake, carried through to perfection" and "a write-only language." For certain kinds of problems, though, it makes programmers very, very effective.
Wish I had known about this before. I have "Utils" directory that I've hauled around from computer to computer since, at least, 1986, when I added DIRERASE.EXE to my utilities (09/09/1986). The second oldest is a shareware editor written by a friend of mine entitled, simply "E" that I used for a long time (07/06/1987).
The oldest commercial apps I have are FASTBACK.EXE (a backup program, I think it was commercial), dated 08/17/1988. And SPINRITE (a great tool for setting the interleave of your MFM or RLL hard drive (10/12/1989). It doesn't seem to want to work under Win2K... Strange.
And then the all important CORETEST.EXE, a hard drive benchmark app that was great (04/23/1990).
Yeah, there are still a lot of console automation systems running on old c-64s, 286 machines, classics macs. My old Allen & Heath console uses a C-64 for mute automation, although we threw that system out years ago--it is easier just to do it manually.One friend of mine still uses a Mac classic for midi sequencing--he sees it as a talisman of sorts.
Don't Panic!
The very first unix in 1970 (?) came with ed, nroff and the fork() system call. I use ed throughout my jumpstart scripts and for quick editing jobs for which I have memorized the syntax. Now the first unix was not a commerical system per se. But HP-UX sure is.
mov --(pc),--(pc)
WordPerfect released WP6 for DOS at one point, probably the most advanced graphical application DOS ever saw.
Even counting Quake by Id Software?
Will I retire or break 10K?
In 1997 I interned for a local telephone company, since bought up by SBC. I was porting telephone switch conversion C code from AT&T 3B2's to Solaris with comment dates from 1978. Nearly as old as me. It was quite a learning experience to see how the conversion program was written with forked processes and piping tricks to get around machine limits(great experience). Also neat to hear how much faster it runs now.
No, Win '9x was NOT designed as I wished it was.
I realize you could edit the MSDOS.SYS (or use a tool like TweakUI) and hack it so it starts at a command prompt.
Problem is, the MS-DOS, v7.0 running beneath it was not nearly refined enough to keep DOS a viable product. Microsoft was hell-bent on killing DOS, as you can see by the steps they took throughout Windows '9x updates to hide the DOS layer from plain view.
Finally, by Win2K, DOS was eliminated completely.
What I had in mind (among other things) was a DOS that automatically saw the total amount of RAM in a system and could auto-allocate any of it as EMS or XMS on demand, without need for loading device drivers in CONFIG.SYS to "manage" the memory. In fact, it seems like they could have designed it so conventional memory always appeared to still be a full 640K, no matter how many devices you told it to load into conventional. That way, all the old hassles of juggling device drivers around and running "memmaker" would vanish.
Vertical-market apps such as this are not cheap, and for the medical market (with which Chiropractic shares the same insurance-billing related processes), there's an expectation that you'll have big big $$$ to burn (upgrades aren't much cheaper than outright purchases).
I could see a situation where if a practitioner is only working part-time out of his home, maybe as a prelude to retirement, and cares only about function, not form, the old adage "don't fix it if it ain't broke" applies! Same as those lawyer-types have an addiction to WP-DOS 5.1.
He refuses to spend the time to learn something new.
For someone hypothetically in the above situation, why bother? There's more to life than learning new (GUI-paradigm) versions of old DOS programs. Not many M.D.'s and D.C.'s are nerds like us!
P.S. The Chiropractor in the above discussion sounds a lot like my father (and no, he doesn't believe in aspirin)! Ain't it a small world?!!!
for compressing one or two files it is much smaller and much easier to use than old dos PKZip ... or any Winzip
Have you tried switching to the Info-ZIP suite?
Will I retire or break 10K?
I've still got a copy of IBM Personal Editor 1.0 on my machine. It runs in the DOS window of XP on my dual Athlon 2000 computer. Quite a difference from running it on the original IBM PC at 4.77 MHz. I got a copy from a girlfriend in college whose Mom worked for IBM. Man, that was a while ago.
Why do I still use it occasionally? Because it has block editing features I've never seen in another editor. It rocks! Jim Wyllie, whereever you are, you da man!
*** *** You're just jealous 'cause the voices talk to me... ***
Finally, by Win2K, DOS was eliminated completely.
DOS was eliminated in NT 3.51, if you want to look at it that way. Win2k is not an intended upgrade to the Win9x line.
So it was either by WinNT, or WinXP that DOS was properly eliminated, but certainly not 2k.
Here is a blurb on the machine: Northstar Horizon
Slashdot quality declines as the number of hot grits posts decreases. - Provolt's Law, Apr-09-2005