What's the Oldest Hardware You are Still Using?

ScottBob asks: "Seeing the recent post about the vintage computer festival got me thinking about old hardware I'm still using in my 'modern' computer. I have a 1 ghz Celeryonion machine, but when I bought the mobo I specifically looked for one with an ISA slot so I could still use my old Zoltrix modem I bought in '97 when V.90 was adopted (when it probably would have been cheaper to buy an ISA-less mobo and a PCI modem). I've also moved a '93 model floppy drive from machine to machine, and it still works. Usually, monitors and power supplies survive the ravage Moore's law has on hardware, but what other things does everybody else save when they cruft together a new machine? Anybody ever do things like disguise a 4 GHz P4 in an ancient 8086 machine box? While on the subject, is anybody still running old DOS programs in a DOS box on a Windows machine (e.g. a database) because your company is too poor/cheap to upgrade or doesn't want to bother with any free alternatives?"

Comments

Ancient UNIX-style hardware at work

[moosesocks]

At one place which I assist with IT in, we still run the same UNIX-based billing/accounting system as we did in 1986.

As I am comparitively new, compared to most of this hardware, I wasn't around to see it installed. About 8 years ago, the original Bell Labs Unix server was replaced with an x86 SCO box.

Many of the Terminals remaining are original. The printers both lasted until about a year ago when they simultaneously died.

Our software vendor stopped supplying updates about 3 years ago when they switched to windows. Last month, they completely pulled the plug, and in order to stay legal, we must now move to windows, which will be expensive initially and in the long-run.

I don't pay attention to the SCO system. It just works. It has worked for 17 years. Over those 17 years, we had to purchase one server, a few terminals, and a printer. With windows, we will need to maintain a 3 year upgrade cycle.

And the sad part about all of this is that there was absolutely nothing wrong with the unix hardware. Last week, I sadly removed the terminals, and installed terminal emulation software on the new windows PCs. Sure, I could have attempted telnet, but the server predates TCP/IP, and I feared corrupting the otherwise flawless system in place.

I know we have plenty of reasons to bash SCO, but I must testify that anything that can last 17 years with little or no maintence is worth keeping. I've already had calls about the windows hardware not working as expected. Ugh.