Slashdot Mirror
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 Many people complain that businesses are using heavily outdated software and hardware. These complaints claim that using outdated tools indicates lethargy on the part of the business or organization.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.
Definitely the Blue Screen of Death!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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/
Well you'd better go catch it!
n00b!
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.
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.
All your favorite sites in one place!
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?
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 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
... and because nobody's left who understands it, unknownst to the company, the original authors still receive their full paycheck in the mail every every week, even though 2 of them are deceased :-)
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!
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
They also used a 40+ year old measurement microphone to calibrate it.
burris
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.
...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
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.
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...
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!
wtf.... why do you associate someone's death with dukes of hazzard reruns??
I hope when I die, someone says....
"SamBeckett died right after the 30 year aniversery of Futurama rerun on Tuesday night right after Geriatric Friends"
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....
The US Federal Aviation Administration is the largest purchaser of vacuum tubes in order to run our air traffic system. Is that scarier than shoe bombers or what?