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Oldest Supported Software?

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the had-to-walk-uphill-to-school-both-ways-in-the-snow dept.

Dave Santek writes "In development since the early 1970s, the McIDAS [Man computer Interactive Data Access System] software celebrated its 30th anniversary in October 2003. McIDAS is used to integrate and visualize weather information. The software was originally run on a Datacraft /5 and has gone through 4 major hardware configuration changes over the last 30 years. It is a supported software package that remains in use at more than 100 locations worldwide. A history of the first 25 years (pdf) is available. A freeware version of the software is also available."

3 of 245 comments (clear)

  1. Re:TeX is about that old... by WillAdams · · Score: 5, Informative

    The situation isn't as simple or straightforward as that, and in may ways, it's much worse (TeX documents taken by a publisher, poured into Word for copyediting, then typeset in Quark w/ all equations reset using proprietary XTensions such as PowerMath or York Graphics' XMath).

    Opensource software in many ways is catching up and surpassing Word---LyX, http://www.lyx.org is one of the most promising and innovative, a ``What You See Is What You Mean'' document processor, it's actually used by some compositors to make LaTeX documents accessible to mere mortals so that they may then by typeset using the publisher's style---let me know what you think of Kaplan's _Introduction to Scientific Computation_, just released ;)

    William

    --
    Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
  2. Insurance Companies by lscoughlin · · Score: 5, Informative

    Insurance Companies are still running mainframe systems to track your annuities and policies that have been under active development and support since the 1960's.

    Systems like lifecomm, all writen in assembly are still worked on.

    -L

    --
    Old truckers never die, they just get a new peterbilt
  3. Re:Here's another ancient one that DOES impact you by Jetson · · Score: 5, Informative
    Count the number of large scale commercial airports in Canada. Do the same for the US. Now, count the # of flights that pass in/out of each of those airports in Canada on a given day. Do the same for the US.

    You guys have more airports and more aircraft but also more sectors and more controllers. The net effect is that the number of flights handled at any one display is roughly constant (and limited by human capabilities).

    The real reason the FAA isn't using the Canadian solution is that it's not complete. As I mentioned elsewhere in this thread, we are replacing systems one component at a time using emulation on modern hardware. Our components aren't interchangeable with your components due to differences in system architecture. They might do well to consider following our approach to the problem, but I doubt the resulting systems will ever converge.