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).

Comments

It's got to be

[FreeLinux]

Hello World!!!

Re:It's got to be

[JUSTONEMORELATTE]

Ok, I'll confess -- My line 10 was really "PRINTLN "I LOVE AMY MCCRACKEN"
It was the 3rd grade, what did you expect?

--

Re:It's got to be

[Anonymous Coward]

i've been running this:

.LOOP:
JMP .LOOP

on my commodore 64 since 1983. i'm still waiting for it to finish. maybe if i got a faster computer.

Re:It's got to be

[ncc74656]

10 PRINTLN "HELLO WORLD"
20 GOTO 10

That's going to produce 0HELLO WORLD as repeating output, which I don't think is what you want. LN is an uninitialized variable. PRINTLN isn't a valid command, but it'll get interpreted as PRINT LN, which will display as 0.

(The scary part is that I fired up Applewin to verify those results...I was going to fire back ?SYNTAX ERROR IN 10 as a reply. I have no life. :-) )

Does he use the Spinocylinder?

[Dirk Pitt]

My chiropractor is still using Medi-Soft on his 286-10MHz with 512-Kbit RAM and an old 40-Mbyte drive, running DOS 5. He refuses to spend the time to learn something new.

Yeah, that's a guy I want to be adjusting my back. Probably doesn't believe in that 'new fangled' aspirin for aches, either.

Re:Does he use the Spinocylinder?

[swb]

Shit, he believes in chiropractic for starters. Doesn't that worry you enough?

Longest running app?

[bugnuts]

Definitely the Blue Screen of Death!

Slashdotted...

[BlindSpot]

Well we know it's definitely NOT his web server!

MS Flight SImulator

[Smallpond]

Microsoft Flight Simulator: A Century of Flight.

I'd say 100 years is a fairly long-running app.

Re:MS Flight SImulator

[haystor]

Well, before Windows 2000 there was Windows 3.
I guess that would make it 2000 years old now.

How about version numbers? Emacs is on 21.something now. I think AutoCad is up in the 16 range by now.

Re:My Dad Still uses Lotus 123

[Dolly_Llama]

bassicly the right tool for the right job. Why complain or tinker with it.

You must be new here... [/tongueincheek]

Re:Mainframe

[orthogonal]

My girlfriend's mom wrote some of the first conversions of actuarial tables to mainframe, from books, in the 1950s and 1960s (all done w/ punch cards and machine language, of course) at a life insurance company in Mass. The company was still running a lot of her orgininal code when she retired a couple of years ago.

This is obviously an apocryphal story.

Who can spot the inconsistancy that gives this fakery away?




Exactly.

We all know /.'ers don't have girlfriends.

Re:Mainframe

[Ryan Amos]

Hey now.. A lot of slashdotters have girlfriends.. They just don't look like girls.

I always liked...

[Grog6]

...going into radio Shack and typing

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 /r

to the autoexec.bat ran the program from boot.

Truly evil, we were.