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

My Dad Still uses Lotus 123

[jellomizer]

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.

Re:My Dad Still uses Lotus 123

[Schnapple]

why change? maybe because excel xp has hundreds of more options than lotus 123 and is easier to share work.

For a brief period of time my mother-in-law entertained the notion of becoming a medical transcriptionist. The doctors rattle something off into a handheld recorder, you get the tape, you type it out. One of those on-the-side businesses.

So we do some investigation and one of the things she'd need is WordPerfect. I don't remember if this was a requirement (like she'd be sending these files digitally) or if it was just the "accepted thing", but we started to research how much it would cost to get her WordPerfect, which we though was sorta asinine since her PC already had Word (came with the machine of course).

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.

We found someone else in the business and asked her why in the world this ancient program was still being used. She told us that the legal and medical professions still use WP5.1 religiously both because everyone's so used to it and because everything in the program since that version just slows them down. Remember, these people are the ones typing the volumes and volumes of legal and medical documents out there. They want productivity and they want it now. They don't want to wait the half second for Word to figure out whatver it's doing in the background to render bullet points.

WordPerfect released WP6 for DOS at one point, probably the most advanced graphical application DOS ever saw. But of course few if anyone wanted that - they either fell into the camp which wanted the lean and mean DOS WP5.1 or the people who were already seeing how nice Windows made everything look already. To this end WordPerfect even released a WP5.1+ to give WP5.1 compatibility with WP5.1 documents. WordPerfect was also pretty good about at least trying to be on every desktop platform, like OS/2 and Linux. WordPerfect was then bought and sold about five times, and for the last three or four major versions has been on board the sinking ship that is Corel. Hell, Corel even tried to pit it on Java at one point.

So the short version of the story is - the reason people don't want to change is that sometimes the options slow them down. Plus there is such a thing as version lock-in syndrome. Ask any psychotic Counter-Strike player which version is better and they'll tell you "man, every release since version (whatever) sucks!"

A further study might include...

[Jerk City Troll]

...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?

Re:A further study might include...

[denissmith]

As someone who currently runs 1 app on DOS and two apps on Windows 3.11 and has to support NT 4.0 and Mac OS 9 there are a few issues, in addition to the very accurate ones that you state.
I manage a facility that does high-end graphics printing, and if I have a printer that is 12 years old and still makes brilliant prints, but it hasn't been marketed in 10 years then no one will write modern software to support it. So I'm "stuck" with DOS. The issue that worries me, then, is massive hadware failure on the PC, cause I have to find a pre-PCI bus computer. The second issue is data format closure ( read proprietary data formats and character settings) until we have ISO character support and XML or open data storage standards we can't have real data portability, and without data portability you are trapped in a legacy codebase. It is probably a well written peice of software ( or you wouldn't have built so much of your company around it) but it is still a trap. PROPRIETARY data formats are always a trap.

lharc.exe

[AtariAmarok]

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.

Oldest App, or Oldest RUNNING app...

[reezle]

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?

Re:It's got to be

[plover]

Hey, I modified a thread engineering program for a TRS-80 for a friend's machine shop back in 1981, and wrote them a new version completely from scratch in GW-BASIC in 1982. They are still using it today (although I had to port it to the IBM PC Basic compiler.) I also wrote a brute-force change gear combination searcher that took a few minutes to sift through all their possible gear combinations.

At least they've upgraded their PCs a few times since then. But the software still runs. It just runs faster (the gear calculator now has the results before the screen refreshes.)

Norton Commander for DOS

[Larry_Dillon]

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.

Embedded software lasts longest

[gregor-e]

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.

Oldest running Apple apps .. that are STILL in use

[adzoox]

One of the things I suppose validated (for Steve Wozniak) the Apple I and lives on in the iPod is the game; breakout.

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.

And the rest of the world?

[The Bungi]

When I was working in Mexico in the mid-90s as an independent consultant one of my clients (a small hospital in northern Mexico) had an application that they used to track patient payments. I'm not sure what it was based on, maybe dBase? Anyway, it used some sort of database. But it's possible it was propietary.

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 =)

Re: Good for your dad!

[King_TJ]

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.

Re:NT4 Uptime?

[Deagol]

I'd say it's more a function of the service (DHCP?) than anything. You can't much simpler than DHCP. I'd never expect to see an NT domain controller, file/print server, Exchange, or IIS server make it more than a couple of months without a reboot.

That's like being proud of a UNIX/Linux server for having a 3-year uptime when all it does is serve ntp queries! The lack of a power interruption is more impressive than the machine staying up.

Re:WordStar

[Ooblek]

You're not the only one. I've run into a few people using wordstar over the years. One was a guy using it on Win95 to keep track of old correspondence. The other, if you can believe it, was my computer science college professor that ran it under one of the Windows emulators for Linux!

But, by far, the oldest app I've seen was an audio console fader automation system. WordStar may pre-date it in history, but these were 8086 machines with Seagate st-225 20MB hard drives that ran Xenix. They were probably rarely turned off since the early '80s because they recorded and played back the fader movements on an early automated recording console. Everyone was afraid to turn them off in case the hard drives didn't spin back up.

Come to think of it, the timeframes of when the software and hardware was available may place it into the mid- to late- 80s, but I'm sure it caught up for hours running in that time after being powered up for so long.

Re:My Mom

[King_TJ]

Hey, I've been saying since the first release of Windows 3.0 -- if you're working solely with text, you're going to be better off in a text environment!

In a way, I think Windows took a step backwards when they eliminated MS-DOS and made Windows the whole OS. I mean, getting rid of the old 16-bit DOS code made sense, but things might have been more flexible if they just put some work into a major DOS upgrade - and made Windows '9x launch from DOS optionally, like Win 3.x did.

Look at all the work MS had to put into making the DOS compatibility layer run as many older apps as possible. Instead of that, I would have preferred a Win environment with no "DOS commnand prompt" or "DOS box" of any kind. If you want to run DOS apps, you just do it without typing "win" to start Windows up.

The GUI does make things easier for *desktop publishing*, where you're working with multiple fonts and graphics interspersed with your text. For "typewriter simulating", like most offices still do with their computers, a GUI is just needless overhead!

Old source

[AlecC]

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).