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

Mainframe

[FortKnox]

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.

Re:Mainframe

[EdgeShadow]

Don't mean to be nitpicky, but if you'd bothered to read the whole article you'd have noticed that he mentioned a mainframe program called DATAMOD that dates back to October 1971, which is over 30 years ago. As the main focus of his article was PC applications, however, his article did not give much information on mainframe apps.

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.

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

[Dolly_Llama]

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

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

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...

[Anonymous Coward]

Idealy, when programmers write code or engineers design systems, they do it with the ages in mind.

Knowingly or unknowingly, you have said something really insightful there. I had an "aha" moment after reading your comment. Consider a Microsoft programmer working on Windows 2003. He knows that Microsoft is already working on the new improved Windows 2005, and the developer on Windows 2005 knows that plans are already under way for Windows 2007.

Now where is the motivation to build reliability and security into the system when you know the code you are writing will not have a usage of more than two years (or so Microsoft hopes, since ideally they would like everyone to upgrade to the version du juor instantly).

No wonder the products that come out seem like they were written in a half baked manner.

Re:A further study might include...

[Textbook Error]

Consider a Microsoft programmer working on Windows 2003. He knows that Microsoft is already working on the new improved Windows 2005, and the developer on Windows 2005 knows that plans are already under way for Windows 2007.

Do you really think they throw it away each time? Unless you're working on something that's pure marketing fluff, code written for one release has a very good chance of being around in the future.

It's a law of nature that code always lives longer than you expect - the cost of throwing things away and rewriting from scratch is almost always worse than the downside of massaging it to deal with the next requirement. It's the mark of good software that it's ameanable to that - unless you're writing a throw-away bit of toy code for yourself, you should assume that anything you check in is probably going to be around in some form for years...

Happened to me recently when doing consultancy work for a company I used to work for 10 years ago. They still have modules which are pretty much unchanged since I wrote them way back when as a new grad, minus the inevitable bug fixes and new features.

Longest running app?

[bugnuts]

Definitely the Blue Screen of Death!

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.

It's SyncSort

[Animats]

The oldest commercial application, i.e. one sold as a software product, is SyncSort. SyncSort was one of the very first commercial third-party software applications. It was also the first to be patented. SyncSort, Inc. was formed in 1969.

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.

Go outside

[teetam]

Go outside USA and you will find tons of such applications still being used.

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.

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.

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: 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.

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.