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What's the Oldest Technology You've Used In a Production Environment?
itwbennett writes: Sometimes it's a matter of 'if it ain't broke, don't fix it,' sometimes corporate inertia is to blame, but perhaps even more often what keeps old technology plugging away in businesses large and small is the sense that it does a single, specific job the way that someone wants it done. George R.R. Martin's preference for using a DOS computer running WordStar 4 to write his Song of Ice and Fire series is one such example, but so is the hospital computer whose sole job was to search and print medical images, however badly or slowly it may have done the job. We all have such stories of obsolete tech we've had to use at one point or another. What's yours?
Pen and paper?
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power lost.
One of the servers was on wheels. Wheels
I have used very old technology (like delay line computers) but that was a long time ago...
I was working in a system in 2009 which had code commits as far back as 1983.
I have been upgrading some desktops from Windows Vista to Windows XP, just because Windows XP allows network printing properly from the MSDOS-based billing system.
...been around since '71.
I'm working on a project to replace a legacy system that runs on Fox DB and is completely DOS based. It's so old that it can't actually be run on desktop systems without a VM because it's 8bit and all of our current systems are 64Bit.
Do fire and wheels count?
"You punks had water?!? We had to get our own oxygen and hydrogen atoms and smash them together before we could walk uphill both ways in a snowstorm!"
Infuriate left and right
In the mid-80s, two work colleagues rigged up Speccy between a weighing machine with a RS232 interface so that it could talk to a till. The Speccy's job was to poll "What do you weigh? What do you weigh? What do you weigh?" then helpfully pass it on, "It weighs this much. It weighs this much. It weighs this much." It ran for years.
A .NET Web Api 2 web service that runs a borland pascal executable...
In my last job, the oldest piece of technology they had was... ME. =P
And it (me) did very well, indeed. =D
Lisias@Earth.SolarSystem.OrionArm.MilkyWay.Local.Virgo.Universe.org
Can't get much lower tech than that.
I've only just removed the last 4 ESCON directors from site after many years of service, still with the original IBM-PC hooked up to them as a console. They were built like tanks.
We used an old 386 Compaq desktoip for a DNS server at my first IT job. That thing was manufactureed in 1991 and we were still using it wen I left the company in 2001... It was funny the day I asked "Hey whats this thing doing here?" and tapped the space bar and my boss freaked out a little. He said something along the lines of 'we really need to upgrade that..."
Nuff said.
http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/infrastructure/a16010/30-year-old-computer-runs-school-heat/
I wrote commercial code for a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... in 1995 - it was 10 years old even then. I just removed some Java code dating to 2000 from an in-use code base, but haven't deployed to production yet ;)
This is not a sig
I use RS-232 (essentialy a 50 years old technology) regularly to read data from lock-ins, picoammeters, and various other instruments. It works well enough, I don't need extra fast reading (the measurement itself is the slowest part). It's not always a smooth ride, but overall it's pretty reliable and straightforward.
...what is the oldest computer technology that you have used in a production environment?
It's not obsolete if it's still capable of performing its function within specifications.
The ability to *alter* it to match *new* specifications should be taken into account (if it's written in a language no one speaks any more), but that doesn't prevent it from functioning.
Systems that have to deal with altered specifications because the environment around (physical or virtual) them changes can become obsolete faster than systems that are disconnected from their environment.
Note: That's an excellent reason to keep your systems disconnected from the environment.
Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,
Boxes keep getting stuck on the conveyor. Two-ton boxes.
We have phone systems and network switches that have serial, still configured for 9600-8-N-1. We have modems connected to the phone system devices that can be called via POTS line to do maintenance if all other methods fail, and since we have all of six people to take care of eighty sites we'd really rather not go for a drive if we can avoid it. I also happen to have a WYSE-52 on my desk that I have connected to a switch console port at 38400; If something breaks the workstation VLAN for whatever reason, I can still maintain the network through a different VLAN through this terminal.
I used to work at a place that handled paging (like, literal TNPP and TAP paging) and we had Digi serial multiplexers with 24 serial ports for connecting to 24 individual modems for paging, fax, and other low-speed services. There were lots of customers still using that technology too; we tried to migrate to Equinox and their digital modems (basically a T1 that emulated 24 modems) but they had trouble with extremely short-length low-baud connections causing lockups. It was literally better to have a huge room full of equipment because it wouldn't crash instead of a single rack full of PCI cards that would constantly have port errors.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Do fire and wheels count?
"You punks had water?!? We had to get our own oxygen and hydrogen atoms and smash them together before we could walk uphill both ways in a snowstorm!"
I would have fired you for wasting that time smashing atoms instead of catching the snow.
The first gneration of graphics workstations were LISP machines from Texas Instruments and Symbolics in the early 1980s. UNIX work graphics workstations from Apollo, Sun and Dec followed a few years later.
The oldest I have used is a wedge, while producing fire wood.
SCO Unix runs GREAT inside of VMWare... don't ask me how I know this, as I get back to the server room to beat the shit out of some random OS that isn't performing well... again....
A DEC PDP-9 in the late 90's that a hospital was still using as their primary patient registration system. Y2K finally killed it.
3Com thin net gear (coax cable, repeaters) working for Federal Health and Human Serivces in San Francisco
Manufacture date sticker on the gear said November 1974, same month and year as my birth
I lobbied to end the requirement for an examination of the ability to decode Morse code with your ear and brain. Until 2007, the U.S. Federal Government required it before they would license all but the lowest grade of Amateur Radio hobbyists.
As part of my lobbying effort, I successfully passed a test for receiving code at 20 words per minute, and then subsequently refused to use the code on the air. 20 WPM is so fast that you have to decode by the sound of each character, you don't have enough time to pick out the individual dots and dashes.
We won.
Bruce Perens.
via USPS today instead of an email. I even remembered to put a stamp on it.
Given this is slashdot, you're probably thinking "fuck Heineken man - we're talking' computer shit around here dude!"
So my oldest piece of digital gear is a box of floppy disks from the mid 1980s - "original copies" of files I made and some software that will never see the light of day, and sound disk for my 1986 DSS1 Sampling Synth that is mouldering in the basement.
HW
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
The Pixar code base came from Lucasfilm, and went back to the 1970's. Some of that code is still in use.
Bruce Perens.
My artificial hip.
Bark less. Wag more.
I had a college professor who strongly resisted getting a new computer. He had a commodore PET with 8 KB of ram. He would type his handouts into the PET, but it could only hold about 3 pages of text before running out of RAM, so his handouts would end abruptly (sometimes mid sentence) because he had run out of memory while typing. On the PET, you could create longer documents by establishing a new file when you ran out of RAM, but he usually didn't bother. When he printed the document, he only had an 8 pin printer, so it couldn't print the letters 'g' or 'p' properly. It was hard to read because he would use a mimeograph machine to produce copies after printing,
CSB time. I went to a community college the first 2 years it was open (Cuyamaca college, San Diego county if you're in the area). In my first semester computer class the instructor took us on a field trip, on a Saturday. There were 3-4 of us who agreed to go, we met on campus. Got in teach's pickup, he drove us to the midway district, into an industrial park, and into an alley going behind a bunch of buildings. There we saw a PDP-8 sitting by a door. Turns out the PDP-8 belonged to my instructor's old company and they were donating it to the school. Our "field trip" was providing muscle to get the thing into the pickup truck, back to school, then into the computer lab.
/CSB
Used that PDP-8 for the next 2 years, it was the only computer they had.
Important Aeronautical equipment still being programmed in JOVIAL.
Huh. I'd have fired you for crawling so low that everything just whooshed right on over you.
Infuriate left and right
in use at my job in 2012 still used 8-inch floppy disk media. When we did a DVD of the 1970s version of Charlotte's Web in 2004, the lab where the original 1 inch Type C videotape was stored also sent us the EIA-608 information on one of those 8-inch floppies.
I recently replaced a client's flaky USB modem for a dedicated fax PC (used daily, all day) with an external US Robotics 56K Serial modem made in 1996 I had gotten from another client. Made in the good ole' U.S. of A. by beer drinking, beard-having men. Its red lights flicker like I remember in the old BBS days - I suspect it will hum along for years to come.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
...and any other stuff that fits the requirement.
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
...phasing out a set of equipment this summer that consists of several dozen 286-class machines running some ancient version of VxWorks, and interface with discrete hardware elements via the GPIB protocol.
In 1984... video keying on an Apple ][
One of my customers still has a Netware 3.12 machine. I'm the third person to be responsible for it. The last two guys are both retired now. I got the gig based on being the youngest person the company could find who actually knows Netware. It runs their ordering/job cost/inventory systems and whatever files or reports it makes can actually be used by their relatively modern accounting software.
Another guy I do work for has a System/38 machine in his office. I have no earthly idea what he does with it since he's a primarily a studio photographer, but I have seen him accessing it through a terminal session. My best guess is that it has something to do with his home-made film printing system. He was an engineer for a while and his place is full of cool stuff.
I've also been in law offices where secretaries were still using Windows 3.1 as recently as 2013, but in that case I'm pretty sure it was just the lawyers in question being just THAT cheap.
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
no one likes you...
My Linux systems jack into Dorados running OS2200. We've carted out quite a bit of mainframe over the years. We also carted out VAX 7000s, because we run VMS 7.3 on emulators now. These environments are quite old.
Fairly much everyone uses TCP/IP, that dates from the 70's.
everyday
Why, just this morning I turned on a computer that initialized itself to be compatible with an Intel 8086 from 1978.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
If you got a recent car, you probably are using composite video in NTSC format! And I bet most surveillance cameras use this cheap distribution mechanism too.
Apart from that, I had to remote login to some Solaris 5.8 machines with SPARC CPUs due to availability of software. There are simply no new versions of the software for this given cheap to run machine. I am not sure if I prefer C on an outdated Solaris box, or the new but outdated MS Excel + VBA 6 solution that new machines use.
We have our legacy system "Theseus" that has been running since the early '80s. Sure the hardware it runs on has changed three times and we've re-written it four times, but it's still the same legacy system we've always had.
Funtime Candy Wow! - my plan for eventually conquering Japan.
Used them to wedge open the server room doors and windows. Rocks also make the concrete stronger and less expensive.
Though I guess the air used to cool the servers might be pretty old too.
that was working until about a month ago. When I first setup the system in 1986, it seemed like a good idea. Most of the sensors and relay boards I made then for the IEEE-488 bus still work. Also, I had a IEEE 1284 parallel port (like the one that comes on that IBM PC garbage) that plugged into the cartridge port to give me eight more signals to use to control relays. My company spent nearly six figures to replace three C64s. It's amazing how some technologies have gotten more expensive rather than cheaper.
3cdaemon... with ini files!
If you are talking back in the day I have worked on PDP-11's
If you are talking current job, I am working on a few production systems that are over 21 years old.
The last one that died I was asked "Why did it die?"
Me: It's 22 years old and the drive went out.
Boss: Yes, but why did the drive go out?
Me: It realized it was old enough to drink, went out and got a 12 pack and in a drunken stupor decided life was not worth living.
Boss: Thats not funny, can you fix it?
Me: There are no parts. Not even sure we can get the parts.
30 min later
Boss: I found and ordered replacement parts. They are on the way.
Me: Where did you find the drive?
Boss: E-Bay.
Posting Anonymously so you don't realize that large parts of the aviation industry are dependent on OLD computer hardware.
Production wise, Lotus notes from 96. The server was originally implemented as a Scheduling system and email server; Email was ported long ago, but it still runs the production schedule. On the other hand, my friend has a machine shop. He has a CNC Boring machine, that is from the 60s(I am assuming). Only way to feed the program to this machine is through punch tape. He had called me to see if I can figure out any other way of doing it. Upon opening the computer box, oh boy, huge motherboard with loads of wires, rather than screwing something and turning his machine to scrap. I decided to acknowledge it was way out of my league. On that note, what really got me, was he can still buy those tape reels at the machine supply store. And he has tape copy machine, you feed tape on one side, and the it punches the tape on the other side. The whole thing is mechanical. so Punch tape still in use.
I am at loss with words...
We had a TRS80-100 in use until around 2005, it was collecting data at a remote weather station. It was there the early 90's when I was hired, so I don't know how long it was actually in use.
Passionately Indifferent
I started working for an aerospace company in 1981 I was working as an RF tech on a microwave transmitter line. When I was introduced to my mentor and had seen all the wall of test equipment on his bench, I was hopeful I would get to use some of that five year old test gear. That wasn't going to be the case, not at first. There was an HP-5245 (not even the L version) frequency counter that went back to about 1960. A Tektronix model 543 scope and an HP spectrun analyzer that not only twenty one years old but was red tagged. There were other old pieces of gear, the counter used discreet transistor logic, the spectrum analyzer and scope were all tube type gear. Most everything else was from the mid to late sixties. One of the pieces of advice I was given was to never turn off any of the gear, some of it might not start up again. There were a number of work arounds that were employed to get meaningful and accurate data from the spectrum analyzer. It was actually fun for the three months I was going to be using that gear. When my probation period ended and I had not blown anything up I was moved to a new on the oppisite isle with all new (less than ten years old) gear, and I was promoted. Later in life I worked for a small publishing company as their shipping and distribution manager. My computer was a Pentium 75 with 48 megs of ram (after I upgraded it) running win-98 and a piect of custom made database that used Dbase 4X as the engine. I don't know how many years old that software was, I think it was from the mod to late eighties. They never backed it up until the day I hired on. They never backed anything up. This was in 2005... I'm not one to complain about how old or outdated a tool is; after all if it gets the job done and is still reliable that is all that matters.
n/c
Have gnu, will travel.
an old clariion array with dg badges *long* after emc acquired them. my recollection is that the storage controller was running some customized version of win 3 (maybe 95)... revealed only by running some pcanywhere knockoff.
My desktop tech brought me a 386 that had a failed hard drive due to a building collapse (a longer story). It was part of a 3 computer "network" that housed a database of "drug buy" money for the local police department. We replaced the harddrive and put DOS and the database back on it (via floppy backup no less). To the best of my knowledge, it is still in service today. That is how you keep the hackers out!
SD
âoeWho knew something as harmless as willful ignorance could end up having real consequences?â
I see the latest version (after being re-licensed) is from 2012, but the one we are using is way older.
Because Beta sucks,
Fairly low tech
A slim pointed stick (in the manual eject hole of a CD drive). Predates these newfangled technologies like "fire" or "wheel" by hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of years.
Hell, so primitive that even chimps and some other animals use them, although usually for extracting bugs from logs rather than discs from stuck drives.
Dumb terminals... Serial terminal servers... HP-UX on PA-RISC... AS/400... SCO Unix... OpenVMS on Alpha... Funny story, the latter two systems died right in front of me when they refused to run backups. The SCO server was eventually virtualized (as all it did was hold an LDAP database), and the Alpha server simply went away... and the (financial) data never replaced or converted and backloaded into the AS/400.
Buck Feta. You know what to do.
RS-232 serial consoles to network gear. Running at 9600 baud.
My fucking HOUSE has Allen Bradley SLC 100s in the heat system. Advice: never buy a house designed and built by an engineer--plumbing should be left to plumbers.
God help us, a jury selection system used a card interpreter.
I had a circa-1986 Mac 512K running in my recording studio up until the early 2000s. It ran Opcode MidiMac (sequencing) and SoundDesigner II (sampling, front-end for an Ensoniq Mirage). Never crashed, reliable as hell, and very quiet since there was no fan or hard drive. Load the OS and software from a 400K floppy and it would run until the heat death of the universe.
Most everyone involved in music production (EDM excepted) has an affinity for vintage equipment, whether it's an old RCA ribbon mic, an EMT plate reverb, a pre-CBS Fender guitar, or anything with vacuum tubes. It's the one field where "vintage drum machine" is not an oxymoron.
k.
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
I use an abacus to mine bitcoin. Slow, but still works.
Most Linuxes these days exclude old processors. Slackware and very few derivatives (e.g. Salix) still run on a 486, though some of its apps won't. Debian Wheezy just became oldstable and will live until 2016, but it seems Debian-LTS will make it last until 2018 (though many apps will stop working as has been with Squeeze). I hope Patrick keeps Slack working with 486s...
I understand not supporting 386: it's too slow and probably unusable (and not being supported by the kernel adds to this). Even 486s are a bit of an exaggeration, but I suppose someone might still use them as a point-of-sale equipment -- and in some stores I've seen use computers as web clients to mainframes or, I kid you not, with the Phoenix browser -- for inventory checking and product reservation.
But a lot of 586s without some modern instructions (and even 686s without them) are being grouped together with the 486s and tossed into History's trash bin.
And worse of all, as one can see explained in Debian docs, "386" support since long does not mean literally 386 anymore. A lot of distributions which claim 386 support actually require now a 686 at least. Thus even Distrowatch shows inaccurate information regarding architecture support,
Gentoo can help with old hardware but installation is a pain.
New distributions for older computers draw a line at 10-year old machines. But this is our modern world. I guess "old" is now about 5-year old PCs.
For special uses of such older hardware, it's probably a better idea to look for specialized distributions instead of trying to adapt a mainstream one.
Last year that old guy finally retired. That afternoon we took Copher off the friggin' network.
It didn't mean much as we did so automated end runs around it but he insisted that it stay there because of some manifesto a neckbeard wrote 20 years ago that was the darkest day of the Internet when Gopher was subsumed. He was somehow still shocked that the community of network administrators failed to rally to save it.
---- The above post was generated by the Turing Institute. Maybe.
WangVS, ISDN, floppy disk for "file transfers", X.25, SCO, NT4, SunOS 2.5.1, VAX (though this runs in an emulator on a Windows 2008r2 box). Just to name a couple. Yeah for working at a Telco...
The clients have an OS/2 box installed in each of their service (gas) stations. Everything runs on them, time sheets, inventory, ordering, POS, training systems, email, security monitoring etc. In their case it's been a very profitable investment.
Another client has a DOS box they use to control a large self-adhesive vinyl printer and a CAD cutter (self-adhesive vinyl cutter for signage). They made their money back many times over on the software and hardware investment - the hardware was particularly expensive and isn't supported by later OS. The printer uses a dongle licensing system, and the company that made it long since went out of business. When the time comes to replace the box (an enterprise HP with SCSI that may refuse to ever die) it'll be simple to virtualise. The printer and cutter are so rugged they'll likely last forever - the parts that do wear are easy to replace with generic components.
One of the first programs I had to modify was a COBOL program written in 1968. Over time, the source code had gone missing. I tracked down a yellowed, falling apart compile listing, and realize the program had never been copied off cards. It was also written in backward indentation, where command lines start at the beginning, and control lines like IF statements are indented. This allows you to move the working lines around. I ended up typing in the code from the compile listing, and ended up only missing 4 periods. Of course, when I got it working, I then had to make the requested change.
A company had an application that stored snapshots of recordings for digital signal processing projects. Company made decision to "Move to the Cloud". Management gave the directive to port the application from a relation database running on a single workstation to a Cloud application. Two years and three FTEs later they were done. The application performance decreased and many of the requirement from the old system were not implemented.
In 2006 I was working as a system administrator and we were just retiring the production DEC UNIX servers. Yes, actual Digital servers from before it was HP and before it was Compaq. We hated the yearly data center shutdown because we never knew if those servers would come back up. Another group had migrated the applications over to Linux blades.
Everything is done via the command line. To address a specific piece of HVAC/Lighting equipment we have a written list of boards connected to various equipment. Its only consolation is that the system is super fast!!!
hybris on java on linux
Much later (circa 2009) , I was supporting a VT200 terminal emulation program that connected via telnet tunneled over dial up to a government health care billing system. The client machine was NT 3.51 and I don't know what the government server was running. I just know that the server was also emulating a VT200 compatible system, because one of my tasks was to research what emulation clients were still available for NT systems that were also on the government provided list of emulations they would support. What ever system they were using at the time was finally being deprecated and phased out.
I need a wheelchair van for my son. Help me get the word out. https://www.gofundme.com/wheelchair-van-for-jj
I'd hope most agree that that tech's the oldest (& most advanced) of all.
APK
Nothing is older than water.
What about hydrogen and oxygen?
lucm, indeed.
Some code written in RPG on an AS/400 that was hosting a MAAPICS environment. Some of the code updates were dated to the early 1960's, and there were indications that some of the original code dated back to the 1950's.
But yes, technically the oldest technology I have used is either a pencil and paper or the wheels on an old cart - those specific instances of the wheels were not that old, but as instances of the "wheel" object within the OO design schema, the wheel object itself is pretty old.
I was part of a group in 2002 that was getting an application migrated over to run as a web application instead of a batch process at night. I forget what system it was originally written on but it was 6-bit and no money was ever spent to convert the data into 8-bit. So there was a bunch (50+) small programs from the mainframe days that would read in the 6-bit data, convert it to 8-bit, do it's little bit of work, convert it back to 6-bit, and write it out for the next program.
One of the things we recommended was to take the time and get rid of all of the conversions. We did a quick stab at it and it doubled the speed but they couldn't use the modifications because they would have required too much testing. It was a government application involved with the naming of businesses and if there was an error due to a quick patch there would have been lots of lawsuits.
I work on the 12 meter radio telescope on Kitt Peak. It was built in the mid sixties, refitted with a new dish in 1982, and replaced last year with an ALMA prototype antenna. We still use the old filter bank spectrometers. They were built in 1973-4. This item.
The determined Real Programmer can write Fortran programs in any language.
U mad
A pry bar to the the wooden crates open. Might have used an inclined plane at some point, too. No clubs. Yet.
I still occasionally fire up my 1990s-era VCR to play a tape. While the tape is analog, the user interface qualifies it as a simple computer.
I was going to say pen-and-paper but that's not "computer tech," and it's been too long since I actually used my hand-held calculators for that to count.
I also "use" - or rather directly benefit from - the relatively old traffic-light-control network in the area that I live.
have been around forever, it seems. Even today you can get server motherboards with them.
Must be the printers at 17 years old now. Main one rebuilt twice with almost 800k pages printed on a 1998 Laserjet 5. Just retired the last XP box, some of those made it over 10 years :)
The label printer must be getting up there too. LP2543 must be at least 10 by now.
Wait a sec. Here we go!
Our phone system PBX is from the 80's !!! Ad shows it coming out in 1986 and I think we moved warehouse in 1987 so call it that :)
Toshiba phone tech is dumbfounded, something about being older than him.
Should anyone need an analog PBX I probably don't need to hang on to the backup system we got 15 years ago and never cracked open....these things are bulletproof.
We don't use the labels anymore but my 386 will still print barcode labels on the original Epson printer as long as you have some time to kill ;)
We used a 1980ish Wang minicomputer from 1982 til 1998. Got retired in the Y2K rush to update as noone had a clue what it would think. Someday I need to boot it and see, the calender at login goes to 2030!
Both at the same place.
One was an early PLC that was about the size of a large microwave oven. We were still producing new units for replacement parts. You used an ASR-33 teletype to program it. For testing, we loaded programs from paper tape using the reader on the teletype.
The second was a new (at the time) PLC where the bubble memory was used to emulate RAM. Just before I left, RAM prices dropped and bubble memory went out of fashion REALLY quickly. The last version of the PLC that I saw used RAM to emulate the bubble memory that emulated RAM.
Right hand and butter flavored Crisco while thinking about Loretta Lynn - oldie but goodie and keeps on working!
I Google'd "bruce perens site:fcc.gov" and this came up as the first hit.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
The IBM 1410? But that was at U of California. In my first production environment, I had stepped up to an IBM 360/50.
clothing. Also, shoes. Wheels, too.
was using a s100 cp/m system w/ hard-sectored minifloppies for metrology in 2001. it was retired only when the floppies became unavailable.
used a pdp-8 based cad system for ic design in 1991. the movers broke it so it was scrapped.
useda commodore pet system for process control from 1982 to 1994. very basic, very slow.
No old in calendar time, but quite old in Internet time. Requires Netscape 3 or IE4. Still works great now as a single page app written in 1999, with only a few changes since and none in 10 years.
We have a Windows 95 machine doing the same thing.
OS2 Warp 4.
My sausage tree didn't grow, does that make me a bad mommy?
The syntax is very definately from the early 90's-late 80's with it's insistance on get/post and cookies etc along with lack of proper simplistic dynamic content syntax.
Its the oldest thing I've ever seen in use. I'm guessing someone got paid off by a sales person back in the day and its been so stuck in ever since that now it's got a whole new generation of defenders who don't remember why it came about in the first place.
In the early 2000s I got a weekend call in a non-profit's IT department that the creditcard system was down. When I got to the modem I discovered it was a HAYES300 baud modem... That was smoking noticeably.... It was also the newest modem the software we were running knew how to talk to. A combination of custom software lines [Amazingly the software company's support was helpful on software this old, Blew my mind] and we figured out how to get the two talking.... took about 6 hours to get all of the details right. By then we had our brand new US Robotics 56k thinking it could only run at 300 baud, and successfully talking to the software.
1 month later we upgraded the credit card software, which took about 2 hours [and $40,000 to switch to the new license].
The next fourth of July my boss and I filled that Hayes modem with a ton of fireworks/gunpowder, and strapped it to the top of a mortar. we did recover 3 largish pieces of the carcas on the 5th..... so we were not completely successful in our revenge.
use it most days; a tool from several millennia in the past
perhaps slightly newer: knife
even newer, but still pretty darn old: pliers
I drive an automobile. It has an internal-combustion engine.
My computer keyboard has QUERTY.
I think there's a century behind both of those things, isn't there?
Bruce Perens.
A 1930's H navigation facility with a low frequency transmitter, 318 kilo htz, with a 110 ft. Loaded tower. Later I worked on a discrete component Computer with a rotating drum and ferrite bead wire memory. Used switches and enter button to perform testing and reading out on lights in bcd.
I almost want to post anon but I can't resist. When I took over my current job ten years ago, the company used a green-screen accounting system based on an emulated Wang 2200 running on SCO Open Server. That puts the actual technology in use back around 1973. This used the Niakwa Basic2c system. The system was lovingly maintained (!) by some dedicated guys in Auburndale.
Before we migrated it off it we got it running on Linux and I still have a KVM image running this system over Centos 5. The last time I booted it was in 2014, or 41 years after the Wang 2200 came out. I actually used one at Ashland (MA) High School - the second interactive computer I ever used. (The first was a PDP-8 accessed via a teletype at 110 baud from Wayland Junior High School).
We still use SCCS down at my office to satisfy our QA program.
According to the Wikipedia article, this software dates back 43 years to 1972.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source_Code_Control_System
The first thing I thought of was the Magic software that ran support when I was there. This was the late 90s and it was already considered old.
After I looked up that link, I realized that I had written some FORTRAN during an internship. That was in the mid 80s, and the install may have been a few years old for all I knew.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
IBM Selectrix
IBM 360
Burroughs Main Frame
A difference engine: An automatic mechanical calculator designed to tabulate polynomial functions.
The code was originally written in the early 80's and just worked so well it sailed past y2k and other issues so nobody touched it until I was hired to look at it and give recommendations on upgrade scenarios (Read: They asked me if they could give me money.).
I just checked with a guy I met on that job over skype and they are currently executing on the plan I sold them, but until they are done the code is still deployed on their production system.
Windows 98 first edition.
Its never had any updates.
Its still used every day.
It has never crashed.
It only runs one application.
Its not online but it is networked to a couple of winxp computers
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
The machines that receive pop cans and bottles and (if you're *very* lucky) print a receipt that you can use to claim the deposit, found extensively at supermarkets in Oregon, *still* boot up with a Windows 98 (not SE) splash screen. They're so unreliable that people consider the deposit as an additional tax and just throw the cans away instead of trying to get their deposit back.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
That's nothing! In the Beginning, when I was but a lad, before God created the heavens and the earth, I had to work with nothingness. I didn't even have light to see what I was doing. When He did finally get to creating light, that was the most Amazing invention ever :)
About 11 to 12 years ago, I encountered an HP3000 MPE/ix machine dated 1981 or thereabout. It was still running the entire back end for a fairly large charity org based out of Colorado Springs, CO.
one of those bigguns... the library holds a few hundred 650mb discs, and requires special software to access it over the network... only runs on windows 2000 (or earlier). supposedly designed for ipx/spx, but has a 'patch' to support tcp/ip!
Seeing as one it was software, and two its no longer being used I don't know if it counts but for what its worth.... A few years back I was working for a county utility department, they had some ancient DOS based asset tracking database program that would barely run on Windows XP with a bunch of compatibility settings. The thing had to have been pre Windows 3.1. Computers were starting to get upgraded to newer OSs that would in no way run it so I was tasked with migrating it into a Microsoft Access database (I know, not much of a step up). Wasn't too difficult since thankfully it exported to some fairly well formatted CSV files, hardest part was breaking some of the information out into proper field formats which took a little creative work with wildcards and Excel/Open Office.
There is a legend of a contractor who carried an authentic (2,000 year old) Roman Gladius on his belt when training some Army Rangers (and the like) that were about to be deployed to the Sand Box.
So, I was doing maintenance on a program written to use the IMS database (does it count as NoSQL?)
I couldn't understand how the program worked. It looked as though on even days it read the file forwards, and on odd days it read the file backwards. Asked my boss. "Oh, we converted that one from paper tape. To minimise wear on the paper tape, we used to read it the other way rather than rewinding it every day"
In the 1990's, at Ohio State University's Department of Photography and Cinema, there was a 35/16mm Oxberry Animation "clone" stand that was operated by a PDP 9 with moves entered via punched paper tapes. Each paper tape of a fixed duration move was neatly rolled up into little cubby-holes in a tray. It worked fine.
"Moogs! Would YOU buy that for a quarter?" CMK
Tubes! 12ax7, 12au7, 6l6, EL34 and KT88. Early Marshall and Fender amps with various clones...
... for a reason.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Still using Visual C++ 6.0 to this day. It just works really well at generating code without bloat.
I worked on the software for the military patrol frigates in Canada on my first job fresh out of university. It was such an old architecture it had no stack and used magnetic core memory.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
On May 6, 2015 I opened a savings account at Bangkok Bank branch in Chiang Mai Thailand. The person was using a DECpc 333 LP. A sticker on it said "Y2K Ready" I just had to take a picture.
After a while, I bet all that constant light gave you headaches, especially with no matter to cast shadows. Probably a relief when He created dark!
Infuriate left and right
Our everyday backbone is 6 or so of 1987 Fairchild Factron 303 using RDOS. The only upgrade the company has spent was going to 3.5in floppy and a few Genrad ICT machines.
I still use old equipment wherever possible. For example I used my Amiga A1200 for the opening title graphics for a friend's web series. For one episode I did all of the editing on U-Matic videotape. It was shot entirely on VHS.
(warning: plug approaching) The series is called VHS Revue. Search for it on YouTube.
A pickBasic suite running on pickOS against a Universe DB overlaid upon a brand spanking new IBM running AIX. I found a bug in one of old George's programs: he printed out the source, highlighted in yellow highlighter the last edit date; sometime in 1986, with a note that said "Good Job!"
The freakin' laptop still runs a week on 4 AA batteries. I built a custom office purchasing DB in Clarisworks and am too cheap to move to FileMaker. So it sits on a G5 machine and I use it via ARD.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
I've worked with, years ago, a process-control system that actually used magnetic core for storage - it was an upgrade from drum storage. :)
So, that was pre-PC era and it was old then.
And yes, I am as old as dirt
I'm still running an old IBM Model M keyboard. The damn thing is old enough to vote, and it's still going strong!
I was called by one of the local computer repair shops. Seems someone brought in an old SCO box to get fixed and they had never seen anything like it so they called me to take a look at it. When I asked what it was doing over the phone I was told "It looks like the drive is bad but when we opened it there were two ribbon cables connected to the drive and we have never seen anything like that."
When I got there it was a 386 running SCO with RLL drives. They were amazed when I poked C800:5 to get to the controller menu.
Drive was dead, backups were non-existent. I polity suggested that the owner upgrade and put it on display with the date bought and the date it died.
Non PC related, this predates those!
There is a machine shop I do service work for that is using a Toledo dial scale from about 1915, in production, constantly throughout the day. and it woks just as well as it did when it was built, and most people trust it more than the newer electronic scales.
I see a lot of old lab gear also, a lot of people get comfortable with the equipment they use so regularly that they would much rather limp along something that they know well rather than learn something new and better.
The greatest right given is the right to be wrong...
storage room. My co-worker claims it works anyway, I've never seen it on. Looking at the pictures on wikipedia and ddg image search I think it's a model 3 or 4.
I have a customer I support that was/is using a 20+ year old SCO Unix server with FACTS accounting. We migrated their office, which was wired for serial networking to dumb terminals with okidata dot matrix line printer to a new location. Took an image of the server, put it in VMWare and setup Putty as their new dumb terminals over telnet. ( they still use the FACTS accounting software because they don't want to re-train, and have millions of SKUs. They still have the same printer, but it's connected to the machine that's hosting the VMWare instance shared over UNIX print services in windows to the SCO server VM. Since they need the printer and it's special paper (that the company that they buy it from makes specially for them) for their invoices. That migration still up and running 2 years later :D
I've used a smooth rock as a paper weight and a stick to open a jammed optical drive. I'm not sure which technology primates / birds / octopi / ect used first.
I don't think my former employer has ever gotten out of Paradox. And they are using it for web.
At work we have a PC Board component inserter robot that runs off a PDP-8. Programmed with paper tape. Yes. Paper tape. OK, well, plastic punched tape. There is a short stack of 'spare' PDP-8 rack units sitting in the crib just waiting for a failure. But you know what ? Digital Equipment made some rugged machines.
And in my old job in the defense industry we used a surplus Nike-Ajax missile radar, that was run off a synchro computer. I designed a digital interface to run it off a Z-80 processor.
When I was in High School in Minnesota, the school's only computer input was on a teletype machine that connected to the mainframe in Mankato with an actual modem. You could save your work on paper tape. We would whistle into the modem to try to get it to whistle back. When you dialed the number, you waited for a signal and then pushed the phone handset onto the modem when it came. It had 2 games - typing and Oregon Trail (type bang). We would have a paper tape with the alphabet on it and for our speed tests run it through the paper tape feed and get over 200 words per minute.
20+ year old 10 base-2 was awesome until discus-ting 10-Base-T started the rf war
I once assisted a university physics laboratory that was using a mechanical hydro-fluidics computer originally developed in the 1950s. Because it was used as a controller in a radiation environment which would have interfered with electronic computers, it was never replaced. To my knowledge, the computer is still used precisely because it fills such an important niche.
In the days of yore: Burroughs B6900, line printers, Apple ][, PC XT, 5 1/4' floppy disks. The fondest memory of all: the text for my MA qualification carefully typed on an Olivetti typewriter, with the master bibliography organized with 3'x5' cards filling dozens of wooden drawers. Currently: Moleskine / Canson sketchbooks for taking notes (loads of them), and my inkjet printer bought in 1996, still in perfect working order.
Classic Netware 5.1 (circa 1997) running on DR-DOS (circa 1990)
Does using a steak knife as a screwdriver count? Some asshole walked off with my screwdriver. I thought about hunting down the asshole and using the steak knife on him. My thinking was that if I told the jury he had walked off with my favorite screwdriver, they'd probably let me off with a warning. Maybe a $25 ticket.
I finally just chalked it up to experience and bought a metal detecting wand so I can scan people as they enter and leave my space.
You are welcome on my lawn.
I had to use an old system, a Windows 95 box, that ran ads at a TV station I used to work for. The thing popped its clogs one day (along with a few other machines, from a power surge) and none of the IT staff had trained on technology that old, having to set IRQs by jumper and so forth.
I mentioned that I had trained on that kind of equipment to one of the guys I worked with, who shushed me very fast and told me that it'd become my job to fix and maintain the system if anyone else had heard that.
I worked at Kennedy Space Center in the early nineties. You might think that they'd be at the cutting edge of technology, but you'd be wrong. For safety reasons, it's exceedingly difficult to upgrade hardware from an old-but-known variety to a new-but-untested kind. Which is understandable, but... you'd think that wouldn't apply to printers. However, the printing in the firing room actually printed out wet copies. Like, dripping wet, and smelling like toner.
I object to that article, and to the next reply.
In 1988-1989 I was printing marked sense cards (i.e., inked squares not punched holes) with addresses on them, sending them to the Post Office to be put in order, and using a card reader to read them back. CP/M system, dBase II.
In 1992 at that same job, we switched to using a 9 track tape. Programmed my own library for it in Turbo C.
I live in a country thats so old-fashioned they measure things in feet and inches...
At my main job we still have tens of thousands of customers connected to GTD-5 switches that were installed in the early to mid 1980s, there is a plan to migrate away, but it sure isn't going fast.
At my side job, we just had brand new data terminals installed in our vehicles last month, they run XP, I understand wanting to keep it around, but installing it new this long after EOL?
Right here on my desk. Always gets a comment when someone first sees it.
We have a Windows 95 machine doing the same thing.
We use a thermostat.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
One of my first jobs was running an IBM 1130...
Our entire back-end process communication layer is built running NeXT MACH services. Rather than moving away from it when we moved to Windows server from Unix, we just ported it entirely.
Maybe not the oldest, but I still use these 3 fairly frequently and download them onto almost every new computer: 1. SpeedSwitchXP: For breathing life into old XP machines by making them run in max-fan-noise-mode. I guess I could use Power options, but this is more forceful. 2. SpaceMonger 1.x: An old utility for visualizing disk space usage. Still runs beautifully. 3. PuTTY/pscp: There's this old-school HTML 3.0 page that I download them from. I should probably switch to something newer.
yeah, fire ... have to say that's pretty old tech.
and each of the six simple machines too: lever (all three classes), wheel & axle, pulley, inclined plane, wedge, and screw.
In 1981, I was using a RCA 301 computer with another one as hot backup.
It was installed in 1960, and we replaced it later in 1981 with a Tandem computer, and sold it to the last company running one.
This computer collected production line job data from a 20,000 man plant.
If it wasn't running, it was a big problem.
I got trained on it, and it was almost as old as I was :)
C was developed in 1972, still used for many if not most production projects. Fortran was developed in 1957 and continues to be important in scientific computation. Both predate MS-DOS, which was first available in 1981, and I definitely used both personally. When it comes to recognizably modern computing, I don't think one can go much further back in history than that.
In the 1980's I worked for a SCADA company that sold systems with 32 bit mini-computers running as a master/standby arrangement, and using SCSI(1) hard drives. BUT the OS needed the disks to be formatted with 256 bytes/sector - not a problem at the time the system was delivered.
Fast-forward to 2001 and I got a call from an engineer at a company who were still running one of these old SCADA systems - I've no idea how he tracked me down as I'd long since left the SCADA company. Did I know where he could get any replacement SCSI disks ? The company had a new SCADA system on order, but the vendor was running very late and in the meantime they'd had a few disk failures on the old SCADA system and were running out of spares. All new SCSI drive models couldn't be formatted to 256 bytes/sector so couldn't be used. I was told the most of the few old spare drives wouldn't spin up - the bearings were gummed up by the old oil. So method one was have one person hold the drive, and give it a sharp twist while another guy applied drive power. Desperation method two was to blow the dust off, unscrew the cover, and spin the platters while applying power, then put the cover back on before too much dust got in. They never did find any spare drives, and the new system was only just ready in time - by which time there were two drives in service and no spares left.
Because they're still being made.
Well, I wasn't the one using it, but in late 1998, I was working at a printer -- a big industrial one, with huge lithographic presses. The prepress department there was transitioning to using Macintosh G3s for DTP work, and I was there to help with that. The reason for the transition was that their old DTP needs had been served by some sort of DEC minicomputer.
It was about the size of a fridge, with dual 8" floppy drives, so I'm hoping it was a MicroVAX, but I don't recall. Each workstation wired into it had a VTerm, as well as a Barco graphics monitor and a mouse. You'd type in commands to their DTP software on the VTerm, then view the work as a line drawing on the Barco (all it was capable of -- photos had to be pasted in by hand) and adjust it with the mouse.
They'd been using the thing since the early 80s, but apparently it was breaking down and they were having trouble pulling people out of retirement to fix it, and that, plus the new digital press they were building, forced the transition to Macs.
The company got bought some years later, but is still in operation, so I guess things more or less worked out.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
US&S DN11 shelf mount vital relays. Built in 1928 or so. Giant rooms full of them. Racks floor to ceiling and wall to wall. Cherry Street, John Street, Scott Street interlocking plants. Still running all the signals at TTR.
A stuff for measuring resistivity in a cavity that was runing OS9000 which results I would import using kermit protocol. The programming also involved RS232, OS2, and a forth for manipulating a GPIB data bus called asyst ... in the year 2000 in a lab that was famous in research.
Needless to say I think fortran 77 bleeding edge technology ever since.
How about a Commodore running the HVAC for a school? http://woodtv.com/2015/06/11/1...
I recently toured the Minuteman ICBM facilities at Warren Air Force Base. The Launch Control Center still uses 8 inch floppy disks. The tour guide, who was a 20-something member of the 90th Missile Wing, didn't know the size of the floppy. He only knew that "they're not made anymore."
If I were involved with space exploration, I'd say the Voyager 1 space probe.
Launched 1977, still receiving commands and sending back data from interstellar space, 0.002 light-years away, and expected to run until 2025 with no hope of getting any upgrades or even a recharge.
I still have a few clients that send me files with fax machine even though we email regularly and I'm sure they have scanning capabilities. The fax machine needed to die 10 years ago.
Cheryl Fillekes
CDC Cyber 6000 mainframes from roughly 1966 are still defending or at least warning the USA of missile attack.
AN/UYK-43 32-bit computers in United States Navy surface ships and submarine platforms starting from 1984 are still in widespread use.
AN/AYK-14 is a microprogrammed 16-bit airborne computer that was designed in 1976 by the Control Data Aerospace Division in Bloomington, Minnesota, and it is still in widespread use. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
still have a working Kennedy 9 track tape drive.
I still occasionally convert customers off an old point of sale system--some dating back to the early 80's--based on a Zilog Z80. The 10-20MB hard drives in them use an interface predating RLL or MFM. They communicate using bisynchronous serial modems.
Cobol on System/3, assembler on Series 1 and MUMPS on pdp-8.
All were EXPENSIVE systems, with the System/3 and pdp-8 requiring cold rooms. I was impressed by the series 1 for not needing a cold room.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
That was simple
One of the servers was on wheels. Wheels
That's nothing! One of mine was on FIRE!
When you have millions of EUR worth of equipment attached to a DOS-based PC, you don't just toss it out because the operating system is old. So, off the top of my head: we have several measuring systems controlled by DOS-based PCs. Also the oxidation furnace has a DOS PC integrated with it. All our plasma equipment is controlled by Windows NT computers (NT 3.51).
The oldest used to be a scanning electron microscope with embedded OS from the 70's. We sold that machine and it is still in use in another department.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
I routinely launch computing jobs on thousands of Von Neumann machines.
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
I've got a $10M golf course built in 1994 with a pump station using a PLC from 1982. I swear it was obsolete the day they turned it on, though it does have a 5" B&W touchscreen. Can't just plug in a laptop to edit code, it requires a proprietary dumb client (keyboard with 4x40 LCD) No hard copies of the ladder logic either.
I bought a more modern PLC (Micrologix) but I haven't had the time to write the code from scratch. We're talking 7 pumps (4 on/off, 3 variable speed) 6 flow meters, 4 pressure gauges, and a half-dozen electric valves. Then factor in all the code for time scheduling, flow totalizers, fault handling, plus I'd also have to code a new HMI touchscreen so as to be able to operate the thing.
The oldest technology currently in use at my workplace is telnet. The clients for the system we use are glorified telnet clients with a couple of things bolted on, but for compatibility with the handhelds we sometimes use, it has a mode for working with straight telnet. I sometimes use that from PuTTY or a Unix command line.
I had this really weird communication protocol I had to learn to use. You had to modulate the frequencies of compressed gas to convene intofmation. It's really weird and really really old.
At the research center I work for, we have three mass spectrometers (close to $1M when they were first purchased back in the early 90s or so) that are attached to PC-DOS computers. At least one of the computers has died and I was able to replace it with a Windows-XP based system and newer National Instruments drivers (they also still sell the funky interface cards that are used by it).
Another story, secondhand, a buddy of mine works for a large insurance company and said they have a COBOL program close to 40 years old that is still running. Apparently they haven't pushed to upgrade it as it processes something like $1M/day in transactions for the company... not sure in what capacity. However, they approached my buddy, who is younger than the software itself, to see if he was interested in learning COBOL to port the software, as the original developers are all retired or dead.
Well, you know...
Yucaipa Heep pressed the first bricks with his bare hands.
Oldest tech, physically, that I use at work on a daily basis.
Wood turning lathe: mid '60s
Various Spanners/wrenches: some from the 1930s
We had a Sony "Mavica" digital camera that wrote to a 1.3 MB floppy in our lab until about 5 years ago.
Bank of 200 analogue modems
.. it's about 42.000 years old technology, and we all still use it .. of course besides ultra hyper complicated chemical and biological processes that form live for severall billion years now like burning food to energy ;)
Often the old Unix, Mainframe and proprietary systems are actually FASTER and better than the new systems. We are in the process of replacing an old process maintenance, control and surveillance system. The old system was horribly expensive and ran on a single DEC with a bespoke front end. The system has worked like a charm for decades but its now impossible to get the spares we need so it has to be replaced. The replacement system is:
- Two racks with digital and analog IO, No change there in function except much cheaper (but less sturdy) hardware (one of the old cards were 7000USD the new ones are less than 400... there are 40 cards so that is quite a saving).
- Four servers each with 83TB of storage, 128GB RAM, Dual 12core Xeon each server running five virtual machines.
- Two 10 gigabit fiber switches.
- Two 1 gigabit switches.
Is the system as fast as the old "steam powered" one? Not really... Is the response time to the monitored process as fast? Nope.(The old front ends had some built in intelligence with a 68000 on each card) The only pluses are that its cheap as dirt compared to the old one and we can get spares for it. Would we rather keep the old system? Yes!
a knife that's pretty old tech
in my life God comes first.... but Linux is pretty high after that
Francis Smit
The company I work for still has an actively maintained COBOL codebase from the late 1970's that I'm called on to work on from time to time.
It wasn't me, but a friend of mine. They had one of those ancient tape banks you see in old black and white sci-fi movies. For real. The day I was in his shop and saw it, I asked him about the antique, and he got really pissed and started venting. Apparently they had stuff on those giant tape reels, and absolutely refused to upgrade to something faster, cheaper, and more reliable, like a floppy disk for instance. To make things worse, the damn thing was so freaking slow, they had to have a special interface/buffer built, but it kept blowing out because of the massive differences. Of course, he was the poor schlub that had to try and fix the piece of archaic trash. (I had nothing to do with it, so I'm just repeating a paraphrase of his rant and take no stance on it's accuracy.)
I'm not going to tell you what organization it was that would insist on something this stupid and wasteful, but I'm pretty sure you can make a decent guess.
In any manufacturing shop you will find "old" tech. An expensive machine with 10y is "practically" brand new. 20y is nothing if you have somebody to support the machine. 30y not uncommon.
Examples:
A C64 running Basic controlling a very large custom oven for burning in electronics.
A HP9000-375 with a MC60020 CPU running a custom made CAD for a very specific task with an ancient version of HPUX
A Sparc Station 10 running SunOS 4.1.4 controlling a large AC.
MSDOS PCs with 486 and early Pentiums running various CNC machines.
In these cases it is so very important to have (multiple) working backup and or recovery media and very explicit instructions on how to use them to restore. As well as good electricial diagrams for the stuff that is connected to the computer.
I visited one of our other sites two weeks ago. They have a PDP-11 that runs the control systems. I asked what they did when it breaks and they call in the guy who retired x number of years ago who pokes at it until it starts working again. I'm rather glad I don't maintain that site. I would not know where to start. I did take a photo of it, then stood well back in case it decided to retire itself at that point.
I worked for a university not to long ago and we had a system from around 1990 doing hvac, and most the servers were from 2002 and desktops from 2004. network gear was from 1999. this was only a year ago when i had to deal with this shit. left very quickly sense they refused to give a budget for upgrades of that.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Dynet dates from the 70s... still in use. Netlinx is a bit newer... 80s... but god it seems much, much older. Horrid multitasking hybrid messy mess.
We had a few years ago to install a 1930's era phone (made in Germany, still with a small swastika inside) that was used in a oil refinery. It was an "anti-explosion" phone, where all the electric part was double isolated from the outside so as not to spark any inflammables.
We tried to make it work with a Cisco ATA device. The device was already changed in the 80's to support nowadays electrical voltage, but otherwise still worked fine. The rotary dial was useless, as the ATA did not support it. But as it was configured as a PLAR line, it did its job flawlessly.
mazevedo
Does my collegues count?
VT220 attached to a server via serial cable.
Great for having a log running, or accessing the bootloader.
"The more prohibitions there are, The poorer the people will be" -- Lao Tse
We had to deprecate use of fire when we started using paper as a storage medium. Hmm. Which came first lever or wheel?
Electromagnetism must be the oldest tech widely used. Right from RFID (uses electromagnetic induction) to electromagnetic door locks, harddisks, motor actuators, mobile antennas. It is integral part of many things that we are use daily.
I use wheels on the heavy physical things all the time. They used to be square, but overtime they rounded off and EUREKA I reinvented the wheel.
I'm a musician/producer/mixer, so I'd have to say that this is the oldest tech I've used/still use in a production environment:
The Raytheon RL-10 limiter.
http://images.audioasylum.com/usr/y2012/05/63387/Raytheon_RL-10_Limiter.jpg
Where I work, they use as400. Apparently that's still pretty common, but it's only one month younger than I am.
I use Guitar Pro 3 from 2001.
If not computers, then various tools and testing machines dating back to the 1930s - if computers an Apple ][e with an analog/digital board used as a projectile velocity recorder for a gas gun used to compress metal powder into solid pellets. I think it is still in use.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
If you've ever opened a ticket/PMR with IBM, this is the system it uses. Still running 35+ years later and used by thousands of engineers daily. For those curious - no, most of us are not green screening into the thing. Plenty of APIs/adapters that allow for language of choice on the front-end.
Controlling a facility that cost roughly $400,000,000 in the 1990s. But they're due to be replaced with Linux boxen next year.
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
Not that old (late 90's) but still going strong.
I'm a freelance web designer, and have been producing websites since 1999 (I started at 15). I managed to get hold of a copy of Adobe Photoshop 5.5, as released in 1999, along with Dreamweaver 3, Flash 4, Fireworks 3 and a few others of the same vintage. I upgraded DW to version 6 (MX) when someone gave me a copy and a key for it. I still use PS 5.5 almost weekly as part of my job with one of my clients, and still do a lot of editing in DW MX. I haven't upgraded either because of both the costs involved and the changes to the user interface in both pieces of software in the last 10 to 15 years.
I work in academia. Half of the things we use are old, and it all works great! Old network analysers, old oscilloscopes, coaxial cables, computers running MS-DOS (not sure what version, but older than 6.2), expansion cards in ISA slots to control said equipment, dot matrix printers, FORTRAN programs, computers with 3.5" floppy disks as their only way to get to data, ...
works wonders with managers.
While contracted to support Avaya voip equipment I encountered not once, but 3 times, a system in production so old it's amazing the thing is still alive. Uptimes of over 1000 days!!! Currently Avaya CM sits at version 6.3. These systems were version 1. So old it's not even really Communication Manager. So old that to replace the power supplies, you need to send an electrician out to inspect the wiring, just to be able to tell what type of PSU you'll need, let alone wiring it up again. so old I'd expect to see vacuum tubes in there.
While talking to the technician onsite I was informed these things are referred to as "the fridge" because it literally is the size of a fridge. If I had to hazard a guess, I'd say some of this equipment was 20+ years old, right back to the glory days of PBXs with patch panels and hard wiring everywhere.
Find me a box from another manufacturer that has uptimes over 1000 days, is 20+ years old and works flawlessly BUT for a failed PSU.
... some equipment we designed in the 1980's, it has an Intersil 6100 CPU and we are keeping its development system alive for the purpose which is a PDP 8/a.
At the end of the 90s I started a task to upgrade the processor in this equipment but the task was cancelled as "not worth the effort" because the equipment "wouldn't be needed soon".
They're still in use today with no sign of them being discarded.
At a summer job in 1979 my last work was helping to debug a wired plugboard that ran a punchcard interpreter machine. The plugboard was a way to wire (program) the machine's electronics to control how it works. Once wired you slid it into a slot at the back of the machine and ran the machine. This was 1940's technology but in 1979 still serviced by IBM for a few more years. The machine was going into production because the people with the most influence in the company were the shop floor expeditors and they liked cards that they could touch instead of those pesky terminals.
...to create applications : Emacs (almost 40 years old editor). Does it count? ;)
I have this a rather old designed organic device with me, grey, wet and squidgy that's been constantly refined and evolved over millions years ( or 6,000 if you one those creationist types! ). Initially used to control very simple organic devices to ensure more consistent procreation of the early species it was loaded into, it has since been amended and added to until it's now capable of independent decisions, multi-threaded ability and able to move the casing it's grown inside, with extremely precise dexterity. It's only within the last 100 years or so that the device seems to think it maybe limited and as been looking to add further augmentations and upgrades to attempt to improve it's processing and storage abilities.
The wheel? The ramp? The lever? The wedge?
All these technologies were developed before written history, so we have no way of knowing which was first. My guess would be the wedge since those are useful for killing and dismantling animals prior to eating them.
About 5 years ago I did a consulting job for a manufacturing company. They had a PC XT running an x-ray machine in their quality control area. They had tried to upgrade it, but the newer PCs were too fast so the system no longer worked, and of course no one knew the software. They had kept it going until they could no longer get spare parts for the XT to keep patching the hardware. I had to deconstruct this real-time control system and then reconstruct it so it ran on a newer PC.They're probably up to a Pentium by now.
I use the internet (TCP/IP) every damn day and that shit dates back to the late 60's
Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.
I worked with lighthouse systems that changed out a bulb when it blew. Some of the systems in use were over 100 years old, pre transistor, no valve, still providing life critical services.
The system worked amazingly well. There was a spring to swap the standby lamp in to the focal point of the lens. There was mercury inside glass to switch the power over. The switch over spring was held back by a solenoid type device. The solenoid would trip the catch and swap the lamps if the main map was not drawing power. Ridiculously simple system. Basically AC in to power the lamp, and automatic switch over just using a coil and some springs. These are STILL IN USE and I repaired one with parts from a lighthouse museum. The lens rotated on clockwork, manually wound, now driven by motor. More modern systems use up to 12 lamps or LEDs, and can operate for years unattended.
They also made their own electricity on site, and before that they made gas from coal. Newer sites are solar. The last gas lights only went out 20 years ago. They used the power of gas to flash the light. No OS in sight.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_lamp_changer
It may not have been the absolute oldest (there were some 128 baud modems as well as some pretty dated dot matrix printers) but it was up there.
The oldest computer I programmed was a Bendix G-15, a computer that used a drum for memory and vacuum tubes for logic. I stumbled on it at Cal Poly, a college in California. They said they had traded a jet engine for it.
The documentation for the computer ended with a letter from Bendix saying that Control Data had taken over responsibility for the computer line, and it was henceforth to be known as the CDC Bendix G-15. When I returned to the main part of the campus I told some students that the engineering lab up the hill had a Control Data computer..They were very impressed—they were making do with an IBM 360, whereas Control Data Coropration was well known for their fast comptuers.
I have a Sun Ultra Enterprise 2 still in production. Coming up on 20 years or so and still going strong. The services it provides are redundantly provided on other more modern machines though.
Nuff said
I was producing decks, walls, and other things.
Also:
A Hammer, to adjust large machines with small taps.
I regularly get green bar typewriter-style reports for details I need on a quarterly basis. I also must send details on printed reports that they check off manually, printed a file I could email them of course.
Five years ago, I had supply documentation for an audit where the union auditors didn't have computers. We had to print out 16,000 legal-sized pages of documentation and mail it to them.
Amusingly, under these circumstances I may qualify as one of the oldest, as I not only remember Mapics from 1982-ish (we decided not to use it at that company) but I currently work at a company actually using Mapics on an A/400. RPG (various flavors, of course, as some of Mapics hasn't been touched since the early 80's.) I feel a frequent need to wash my hands. It's my fault, I admit it. I didn't have money for college in the 70's and later after I'd worked my way into programming jobs I took the occasional class but with plentiful wok a degree never seemed all that high a priority. I had a great job for years and years as IT manager of a small manufacturing company but they got bought out by a very large company with a corporate data center and didn't need local IT staff. Finding a new job under these circumstances was... prolonged and ultimately disappointing. In today's environment (at least, here in the Midwest USA) it doesn't matter how long you've been working with modern tools and languages, if you don't have a degree your ability to get a job is entirely dependent on good fortune and how good a talker you are. So now I'm an RPG programmer on an AS/400, back where I started (on an IBM S/34 at that time, of course) in the early 1980s. Learn your lesson, rugrats! Get that union card stamped.
You wouldn't believe how slow it is to get even tiny patches to the source code deployed.
One of our Lines of Business still uses Microsoft Cardfile, from Windows 3.1. I THINK we have weaned them off it finally when we went to Windows 7. I know went spent a significant amount of time trying to find a 32 bit app that would open a Cardfile file, but we couldn't get them to pay for the app.
I had my first tastes of IT in a ZX Spectrum and a commodore vic 20; at school in a TRS-80 doing BASIC until they switched to XT. Also had the introduction to Unix and C in HP/UX with serial consoles, and started working shortly after as a C software developer in Xenix and MS-DOS.
A 1956 Stratocaster and a miked 1959 Fender Bassman amp in front of thousands.
our corporate HQ was running on a phone system so old it had a green monochrome monitor. Which it came with.
I work in a lab, and we are still using a lot of 60's and 70's era technology. We use analog oscilloscopes as a real-time display of strain gauge data, we use a fully analog computer to calculate and calibrate analog output from a strain gauge into a proportional load to monitor safety in true real-time. We run OpenVMS O/S on our current and previous data system (also a DEC Alpha).
The software inside the system is still designed around the limitations of a VAX and (sadly) a PDP 11/84. The system treats large data files as a tape drive (and yes, it has to go through an emulated tape loading process).
Not the oldest stuff on the list, but it's pretty old for what is supposed to be a cutting edge facility.
In the last year, our production accounting division finally migrated away from a disparate amalgam of IBM System/3, System/34 and System/36 and System/360 machines.
The last run from the System/360 Model 30 was just before Christmas last year.
The year before that, Billing was finally rid of a PDP-8 that was used for certain accounts that the modern accounting system wasn't designed to accommodate.
Nobody expects The Spanish Inquisition!
At one of the places I used to work we needed to upload daily activity files to a bank. This consisted of using RSA security to log into their system, and then running a IBM3270 terminal emulator. I found that somewhat amusing.
If you want computer tech, I've used Fortran 4G on some ancient IBM mainframe back in college to run some analysis on research results, and we had an HP-85 running an HPLC in a lab a while back. The HP85 had the worst case of screen burn in I've ever seen- the main HPLC control screen could be seen clearly even when the computer was turned off
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
The first server I built as a brand-new sysadmin, I changed jobs 4 times, came back to sort of where I started, and got to decom it. It was a SparcStation 20, delightfully beige, and I think was running Solaris 2.3. It was the license server so the HostID was important, so we wouldn't have to re-cut all the licenses. Especially important since some of the licenses were "permanent", but from companies who are long gone.
After we decom'd it, I had a party with my nerd friends, and we shot it. A lot.
I'm just gonna lie and say I still use CAD software I wrote myself that runs on a Coleco Adam.
You laugh, but the most effective thing used in production today is the one of the oldest technologies humans use.
Spoken language.
Sometimes you just have to get up and talk to someone. There is a whole, substantial portion of the population that just needs to hear someone tell them sometime using voice communication or they fail to understand it. (This could just be the low reading comprehension of people from the USA since the school "reforms" of the 60s. And lead in gas.)
As a skill some other animals posses some amount of ability with complex communication. But the complexity and depth of a normal and everyday human conversation is unparalleled in the animal kingdom. Some monkeys can dig ants with sticks and some birds ask simple questions. But only humans stand up before a crowd and rally each other to great good or amazingly stupid things by the act of slapping meat together and squirting air through their holes.
Abacus.
Had to use in production - It was the only thing that fit between the rows in a warehouse, and could carry 400 lb loads...
and hand carts go back to umtyump BC.
No need to reinvent the wheel.
It just works.
We have bindery equipment that is controlled by AtariST's.
Oh, and patent drawings and language. So, outdated and byzantine.
I work at the Social Security Administration and I have a PCOM link on my desktop. People sitting around me still code COBOL and there is still an effort to remove mainframe assembler modules coded in the 70's
I have had the pleasure to work on Alice Chalmers incoming electrical switchgear that was installed in the 1960s. This was at a cement plant in Missouri and I felt like I should be in a full Arc Flash suit just to get near it, much less open it up. We were installing new metering equipment to tie into a new SCADA system as the plant this switchgear was installed for was being shut down, but 2 ball mills were still being powered from it. There was a new plant being built right along side of it.
I spent some time at an Aluminum rolling mill about 10 years ago. The gantry crane that unloaded ingots and loaded rolls ran on a late 70s VAX.
And another gig with IBM (mid-90s) we occasionally had to interact with some ancient (early 80s) systems that used 8" floppies.
All told, that basically means 20 year old systems were noteworthy for their quaint, antiquey nature.
Well, how many of you now regularly deal with 15-20 year old systems?
I can confirm that this still goes on today at several places I work, except that 20 year old systems today are mid-90s vintage. Pentium and PII type machines.
While I don't deal with them, I know my current company has a couple dedicated systems still running old, unsupported software on old, unsupported hardware to connect to service providers, print oddball forms, etc. Every company has their dirty little secrets. Usually, these ancient systems are dealing with physical interfaces of some sort -- opening a door/gate, managing a device such as a crane, centrifuge, monitoring the state of a system, etc.
Plasma from the Big Bang didn't cool down enough for matter to form for some time.
Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.
Just yesterday we retired our last Intergraph machine manufactured in 1994.
I use an old Sears & Roebuck Toaster from 1975 in my production environment. It produces perfect toast for all the techs.
I do industrial control systems, and while most of it is modern SCADA systems, we still occasionally use good old fashion ice-cube Relay Logic. As in actual magnetic coils pulling mechanical contacts closed, stuck in a box somewhere and arranged in tangled-looking webs to create basic AND/OR Control Logic. This is often the preferred method any time Life-Safety what's being controlled. You have to limit possible Failure Modes, and in those environments the complexity of any modern computer system is actually working against you.
Common Sense isn't as Common as people think...
I support equipment in the industrial sector. We have a few of the Vax QBUS consoles left in production that are from the late 80's to early 90's. They use 46 MB MFM hard drives and to load them 5 1/4" floppies are used. The console support 4 heads via RGB video and serial cables for the keyboard. No mouse on this thing. Some of the units support touch screen through an XY IR interface but those were rare since they were very finicky. The console has removable boards that allow for different combo's of CPU, Memory, Video, and disk controllers. The consoles are surprisingly robust with the exception of the hard drives which have a very high failure rate.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
We were still feeding printer lights into the film printers with paper punch tape until the whole system was shut down. We had to have the machine shop make parts for the punch since you could no longer buy them. We did modify a few printers to take data from ethernet towards the end. The end being a couple of years ago. There are still some working film labs and they may still be using paper punch tape to set the printer lights.
A few years back I did some consulting for one of the big cargo train companies. They had a big mission control type room with maps of all the tracks they manage, with lights indicating switch status and train positions and so forth. The actual switches were managed by a bunch of racks full of PDP-11s running RSX-11, equipped with digital I/O boards linked to the switch motors and sensor relays out in the field. The computer room was amazing, immaculately clean and completely free of static, with air cleaners that popped periodically when they caught a piece of dust. I asked them why they still used those, seeing as there are much more modern computers capable of doing the exact same job, and they replied that they just didn't have faith that new machines would be as reliable.
If at first it doesn't work, use a bigger hammer.
As far as non tech they still use manufacturing equipment from the 60's. I am sure that is fairly common with small businesses, like a shoe repair place near here that still has all the old machines going.
They sell 20 year maintenance agreements on train control systems.
We had AS/400s booting off 8 inch floppies in the year 2000.
I was their OS/2 1.2 expert in 2000. None of that new fangled warp crap for us.
At work we use a Hewlett Packard 4145A semiconductor parameter analyzer that boots off a 5 1/2" floppy that uses custom hardware and physical modifications to the floppy. That's our oldest actual computer system. Stepping back, we have a Tektronix 576 curve tracer; we have no idea how old it is but it looks like 1965 or so. Virtually no safety stuff at all on something that can dump out 250V at 500mA (albeit briefly.) But the analog phone lines to our building are from the 1940's. I'm not sure where to draw the line here...
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
Granted, I've replace the handle twice and the blade once, but, it's still my father's axe.
When i joined my current employer, there was old dos 6.22 box. it was running diagnostics software for few automatic production machines... Gt all sort of fancy logs and statistic and really helped keep those machines top shape...
Now 10 years later, that dos machine is just gone. production machines went throw 150K€ remodeling for their PLC control logic's. And we still haven't been able t replicate usefulness of that old dos box and production efficiency is lagging...
Theres still few NT widows boxes around, but then again this is factory environment where nothing changes to more modern unless its have to...
We still have NIS+ running on a Sun Microsystems Ultra2 Workstation that provides authentication for our Solaris 10 machines.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DMS-100 still running at my CO. VOIP is for suckers.
An adze.
A few years ago I used to work in telecomms. We had an old old oscilloscope that we used to use to test connections between our servers if it seemed the wiring could be at fault, but that probably doesn't count in this case. Actually in use in production - the basis of the software for almost all the products my company sold was the same. These were C components written in the 80s, and not really touched since, so that's the oldest I can think of at the moment.
...will be 19 years old this winter. I realize that's development rather than production, but still, the old workhorse deserves the recognition.
Back in 2000 I wrote some code to do some funky control systems stuff for a Tokomak nuclear fusion reactor as a research project. We happened to have a spare 486 with DOS and Borland C available that had a decent A/D and D/A converter board installed. This actually turned out to be really good for realtime code because you *knew* there was nothing else running on that system.
I had to rewrite the drivers for the converter board because it couldn't give the performance we were looking for--the settling time for the A/D conversions was too long. I figured out a way to interleave the A/D and D/A conversions so that the hardware delay for one also provided the required delay for the other, essentially doubling the sampling rate relative to the stock driver.
These days it'd probably make more sense to use an Arduino...
UI hasn't been updated since inception.
Water and Halon didn't fire up, so we used a blanket to signal S.O.S.
That's "Stone Knives and Bear Skins"!
I have one!
And need to recover the old backup histories that stay there!
LOL !
As far as a "production environment", worked on Data General Nova's with 16k of core, a teletype and paper tape for bootstrapping it. That would have been '77-'79 while in the USAF (Offutt AFB). We also built our own flip flops out of components while in tech school (Keesler AFB). Prior to that, I did get to work on helping build an Altair kit when I was in high school.
Just another day in Paradise
I still use paper and pencil to make notes,illustrate ideas etc. That's pretty old-school.
Itwbennett did not set a time limit for when you used the “old technology” so I guess my experiences should qualify. It the summer of 1958, while a student at MIT, I worked for the Air Force Cambridge Research Center helping to develop a runway-weather-prediction program for their micro-meterology branch. We tried to run it on their IBM 650 but it was too slow taking 1.25 hours for a 1 hour prediction, so we went over to the Institute and used the IBM 740. It took 15 minutes. You could go over to the calculator room and wait in line if you needed more than your slide rule and log tables. We programmed in Fortran, and used stacks of punch cards for programs and data. Results were printed out on teletype terminals. It was awful, especially if you dropped a stack of cards. Now, Wow! I am working on my iMac with my wife placing an order with Amazon on her iPad Air. Our son just called us using FaceTime but I was outside so it came in on my Apple Watch. OK, i am talking about a 50+ year time span. It would be fun to know what the next 50 years will bring.
Update runtime parameters like datetime stamps; override GDG generation numbers in restart situations; directly edit data files in conversions/reimplementations.
WWMCCS ran on GCOS 3, from 1970, until it was upgraded to GCOS 8 in 1989. After the multi-year effort to test and update the existing software for GCOS 8, apparently WWMMCS itself was shut down in 1996. :S
The company I work for has had the same billing system since the late 70s, it's an IBM reel to reel system capable of holding only slightly over 7000 commands, it's the most reliable system in the company and is only being replaced in 3 years because IBM stopped making parts 2 years ago
I laugh at anyone thinking DOS is old. Our active production environment includes an amazing array of thing that should have been junked 20 years ago. We use HPUX, ATLAS and even older software. HP 9825 "computers" : HP 6940B multiprogrammers : HP 362 controllers : and yes no joke --> 8 in floppies -- Your gov't wastes an amazing amount of money maintaining this gear because software upgrades would cost a million and we "can't afford" that.
Tweet, tweet, all id10t's out of the gene pool, open swim is over.
I still use a fountain pen for word processing drawing and diagrams.
Plugboards to program car collating machines and sorters? Yep, they were old but still in use in early 1970's when I first fell in love with computers.
... "When you pry the source from my cold dead hands."
Assuming you don't count operating IBM mainframes as a student employee in 1978, the oldest computer tech I've used regularly is the Unix family. Every time you type "ls", you're reflecting design decisions made at Bell Labs over 40 years ago.
Have you read my blog lately?
My company used a pair of Control Data Corporation Cyber mainframes, circa.. 1976 or 1978, I forget exactly. Original hardware, including all peripherals such as multiple end-user terminals (fancy workstation kind, not a simple dumb terminal) and external network connections with AUI thicknet and proprietary CDC connections. Also a lot of serial connections, which started with couplers but quickly received hardware updates to actual, original Bell 202 modems in the early 80s.
Also original software and NOS operating system, with everything programmed in FORTRAN with some custom CDC additions. These systems were actually susceptible to Y2K, the only systems I ever personally encountered that were.
They used 1" mag tape for long term storage and archiving, libraries and libraries of tape reels. Company went fancy when they first bought the system, so the twins also had hard drives. Massive 100 pound spindle beasts that actually had to crank up to speed over about 45-60 seconds before the heads could engage. They had a full array of eight of those things.
Quite a high-end supercomputer pair at the time it was put together. Seymour Cray worked for Control Data before he went off to found his own company, so basically the Cyber was a Cray Supercomputer before Cray was a company.
What makes it notable and why I put in a post though, is because we maintained these twin units until their retirement all the way up in 2004. This included all peripheral stuff, so the company was on a coax network (though at least it was thinnet by that time!) up until then too, and was still using those Bell 202 modems too. The only reason the company retired those systems is because sourcing replacement parts was getting to be too expensive, otherwise they'd have continued right on with them.
As an added bonus, the 3-phase large scale industrial UPS that was installed at the same time the mainframes were, was also maintained. THAT, in fact, is STILL in service to this very day!
Cold-War era Alteon "Load Balancers." Actually, they're over-glorified switches. :-p
Do they count? They can hardly count at all... haha... We can't wait to get rid of them.
Our system originally went online August 4, 1997 and it took until August 29th 2:14 am when we went live (other dates, like 5:18 pm Eastern on July 25th, 2004, are incorrect those propagating this data should be eliminated). After a pre-revenue phase including multiple rounds of acquisition and re-consolidation, we released our most popular product, the T-800 in 2026 (this too has been misreported as 2018 and sometimes as pre-2015). Fast forward to 2038, and we're still using the bloody thing! It's clearly past its prime, and at times disloyal, but it generally gets the job done. Moreover, every new product we release fails impress customers, despite phenomenal advances in digital effects and marketing. It makes no logical sense.
I used steam heat at one place that I worked. I can say that when it was working it worked well.
Non bene pro toto libertas venditur auro
They had to smash the atoms together to *get* the snow.
just recently had to use ESB to link my teams c# app to the mainframe (they use NATURAL to write all the mainframe stuff)
the SME started here before they were using NATURAL. dude's about to retire.
When I managed a ColdFusion environment years back, I got a request to write a custom tag to interface with IBM's IMS. I had no idea what it even was, but I obtained some sample Java code and basically wrapped it in the Custom Tag framework and it's worked like a charm ever since. I'm not sure if this counts as "old" since it is still maintained by IBM, but the system itself was born in 1966.
VAXs running in a simh container on linux backing a multi-billion dollar e-commerce site.
PBX, AS400, any mainrames. Pen and paper.
Once, in IBM folklore, there was an accounting package in Autocoder. Fifties, it must have been. I came across it running inside a 1401 emulator inside a DOS/360 box in a big VM installation in 1978
Then there was the paper tape that loaded code into a PDP-8 that ran a big bandsaw. Measured the logs, picked cutting patterns, drove the process, that sort of thing. Written back in the sixties, documentation lost. Disassembled the object code, found the problem. Unplugged the engineer's PLC that was between the PDP-8 and the saw.
Aperture cards are punch cards with a cutout for a piece of 35mm microfilm (picture) and about 50-60 characters of indexing data. They were used in the aircraft industry to handle blueprints, because they're fairly high density - a 747 can't even hold all of its blueprints on paper, much less take off with them, and almost all large aircraft back then were unique, with slightly different parts, shapes of metal pieces, etc., due to design and manufacturing changes that happen in parallel to construction, as well as to different end-user requirements.
My company had a contract to develop an aperture-card scanning system that would digitize the pictures and upload the index data to a CICS database. We were the low bidder, which back then usually meant that either we were bidding against system integrators who were even more expensive than we were, or else that the department that was doing the bidding didn't have a clue what they were doing. (Yup, it was the latter.) The contract was hopelessly underspecified, the end-users had pushed lots of scope-creep into it without changing the price, and the only things that were really specific were that it had to scan 1000 cards/hour (it was getting about 200) and the database had 5 unique key fields (the end-users had upped that to 6, which also meant the keys were no longer unique which the database needed), and the price and due date were fixed (they'd way exceeded both, but the database change gave them some negotiating room on schedule.)
My department got asked to help, because we did R&D on things like electronic publishing and Unix systems and system integration, but it wasn't as risky as it sounded, because we'd get lots of credit if we succeeded and wouldn't get the blame if we couldn't help them fix it. I got sent in to do the consultant thing, found many of the things we needed to find (mostly by asking lots of dumb questions about the right parts; I'd dealt with TSO about 5 years earlier and mainframes in college, but had never heard of CICS, and I was mainly a systems generalist and Unix hacker), and we borrowed some people who actually understood CICS to help. Fortunately, most of the problem turned out to be bottlenecks in the interaction between the Unix box driving the scanner and the CICS front-end to the database, which led to the scanners having to stop and wait and get up to speed again on each card, and once the communications got straightened out the scanners could run at full hardware speed, which was something like 1500-2000 cards/hour.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Hyperterminal was still standard in WinXP, and we occasionally use it to talk to serial consoles on routers. (The problem is finding laptops that still have serial ports and still boot, or getting USB-to-serial converters to work reliably; they're pretty consistent at 9600 or 19200, but often flaky at higher speeds.) And surprisingly many environments that had RS232 ports had at least some variation on XModem, or if you were lucky, Kermit, so you could do file transfer over them if you were desperate.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Then you don't have to depend on the walls and roof at your office, and clothing is also usually optional.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Luxury!
We had to use protons, electrons and neutrons to assemble our own hydrogen and oxygen atoms! And we were proud! Proud I tell ya!
No, we weren't allowed to touch it, nor were we allowed to touch the 1960s ATC we were trying to build a replacement for, and mostly the 1950s stuff had been upgraded in the 1970s so it was newer (but still dumber) than the 1960s primary system. The 1960s stuff was written in JOVIAL and ran on IBM 360/50 and 360/90 mainframes, which were long out of production; you couldn't even get the connectors for some of the cabling types any more. The 1950s/1970s stuff was kept around as a backup, and we eventually learned that even though the reliability specs for the system we were designing were so high (99.999999% uptime) that we couldn't afford to take down the backup element in a pair for 5 minutes a year of preventive maintenance, they'd take down the 1960s systems for 4 hours a night and run the backups to make sure they worked and make sure the operators were trained in it :-)
Some of the requirements and design of the old systems was documented, some wasn't, but the real way you learned about the system was by guessing the right questions to ask an old guy named Skippy who'd worked on all this stuff for decades, so while he was explaining it to you he'd happen to mention the things you really needed to know but didn't know to ask.
Fortunately for us, we didn't win the bid; IBM were the poor suckers who did and were stuck trying to make it work.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Yes, I meant that. The Visa-2 credit card protocols have about 100 bytes of data to send, so it's faster to spend 3 seconds syncing up at 300 baud and 3 seconds sending the data than to spend 45 seconds or more syncing 9600 baud or faster modem protocols and 0.1 seconds sending the data.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
They didn't need it to be reliable at speeds over 19200. I've run 9600 bps just fine over 1000' of unshielded twisted-pair phone cable.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I worked on a project in the mid-late 80s that required us to collect data from a bunch of different telcos around the country. It got sent to us in all kinds of different formats, anything from 6250 bpi 9-track tape (Yay! Oh, wait, what do you mean it's in VMS Backup format?) to 8-inch floppies to a box of tape reels with duct-tape on them indicating the tape number and a badly-Xerographed paper copy of the data format.) I really appreciated the folks who sent us dumb vanilla IBM-style tapes, with 80-column records on them - it was boring but reliable.
If you don't remember the VAX 11/780, it had a microcomputer PDP-11-on-a-chip implementation with an 8" floppy drive that it used to load boot code. We decided it really would be safe to put use that drive to read the data off 8" floppies, just as long as we didn't try to boot the machine from them, and it did in fact work.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/com...
From 1960-1996, the Guatemalan military government was running a civil war against anybody suspected of being Communist, where "Communist" meant anybody to the left of Genghis Khan or any poor peasant who knew anybody who might be a Communist or anybody who wanted land reform (which was the issue that prompted the US to overthrow the elected government in 1954), and they murdered and tortured a lot of people, and sometimes kept records. Some time in the late 2000s, a bunch of human rights folks investigating the dirty war and its history found a bunch of secret-police records, some on paper and some on 8" CP/M floppies.
My friend Hugh Daniel got asked to help them recover the data from the floppies - it took him months just to find enough working disk drives in the US that could read them and build a computer that could interface with them, so he could haul it down to Guatemala to copy the data and turn it into some modern format that could be read.
Eventually there was a trial in around 2012-2013, and General Rios-Montt (who'd been "President" in 1982-1983, and had come back into politics again after democracy was restored) got convicted and then got a court to grant him immunity because he'd been President. Ugly business, and not enough justice got done, but some, and at least a lot of injustice got publicly exposed.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Still running DOS 6.X, it's the command interface to the fire alarm system where I work.
We use paper clips all the time to reset stuff.
when we at school, we learn C languge however, i don't know how to write C languge , becase later i come to be a sales Excellent Rubber Roller Factory -----Daxi Industry Co., Ltd Lin Zhang [ Marketing Manager ] Website: www.da-xi.net Email: lin.zhang@da-xi.net MSN: da-xi1980@hotmail.com Skype: da-xi1980 Advantage one— rich experience: Daxi concentrate in rubber rollers technology and manufacture since 1992, owns rich experience in rubber rollers technology and manufacturing. Advantage two— advanced facilities and skilled operators: Daxi equipped with advanced equipments and skilled operators, they reduce production consumption and let Daxi rubber roller have competitive quality and price. Advantage three—20 days delivery time: every month, Daxi supplied to the market 600-1000 pieces rubber rollers, due to mass production, Daxi rubber rollers delivery time can be only 20 days,
My grandpas and grandmas would have had to start with quarks, except without atoms, they wouldn't have existed yet. Makes me doubt my own existence, now that I think about it, since humans are made largely of water. I has confusion.
Infuriate left and right
At one time many terminals used a special warble to train to 300 baud. US Robotics Total Control pools would train in 3 seconds, which made a 10 second capture possible.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
We still have a significant number of electronics boards in production that are tested and programmed by an acorn riscos computer. We have an acorn a5000 for the purpose.
It's kind of cool to point out to people that the A in ARM used to mean acorn :D
Too many "if it ain't broke..." Comments. Stuff it. Developing more efficient and/or simpler designs paves the way for new innovations.
Where I work, at an industrial plant, we are told that silly comment all the time. 20 year old welder a that are Frankensteined up just enough to work... Old absolute tools that are were crafted by the guys that trained the guys that trained the guys that trained me.
We still use a 40 year old manual lathe, hand powered hose crumpers, and 35 year old air arching cutting.
In 2010 I started a new job only to find out they were still using SQL Server 6.5. And Fox Pro.
Our shop keeps fairly up to date on the hardware side, nothing older than say 10 years. Like HP's edge switches have a lifetime warranty, so since I don't have a business reason to switch them out, there are still a few floating around. (Does the mail room really need faster than 100Mbit?)
I have snippets of code in our production systems that date back to the early 70s, but on fairly recent COBOL runtimes (n-1 from the current release).
I have a couple web applications and databases from as far back as 1998 running under some useful but not critical applications and we just can't seem to find the time or money to port to a more modern platform.
My favorite story in this category has to be Sparkler Filters based in Conroe, TX. Apparently, they still have a IBM 402, the only known remaining working system of this classic 1948 model. The Computer History Museum tried to coax the company in selling their system to them as an exhibit, but apparently, they failed. The company will reconsider as they slowly phase out the punch card system for PC's.
To this day I support a ~20 yr old VB6 codebase. Custom stuff that someone before me once wrote to layer on top of a piece of COTS software.
*shudder*
That's pretty much how the higher speeds work also - they negotiate 300, and if that works they signal (argh, I've forgotten if it's digitally over the 300 baud or analog tones) the higher speeds they can accept, and then send tones to see if the line will carry the sound quality needed for the higher speeds to work.
I had a while back in the 80s when one of my home phone lines could handle 2400 but the other (which used to be ok) stopped syncing at 2400 and would only do 1200. Tried to tell the phone company that it needed fixing, they asked what it sounded like, and "}i}}}}ii}}i}i" wasn't an answer they knew what to do with, so they said "sorry, your residential line isn't data rated." Eventually it degraded to the point I could call up and tell them it sounded like [LOUD STATICKY NOISES], and they came and fixed the drop line where it was rubbing against a tree branch.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Until January of this year we had the following running in an industrial environment:
AIX 4.1
OS/3
Dos 6.x (highly customized to run a custom machine)
Novell 3.12
Arcnet network for machine control. (2 of them)
Windows 95 (last version of Windows that had arcnet drivers) Hardware was mostly Pentium 90 level or similar.
All of the above came delivered as part of a system from the manufacturer, and my predecessor claimed to have had no say in the matter
Several times over the years I was asked "Why not upgrade?"
Answer: New software/hardware did *exactly* what the old did -- no better, no faster and certainly not cheaper.
All of these old systems controlled machinery, and the machinery itself was the rate-determining step.
In the 15 years I ran the department, we lost less than an hour of production time due to computer failure -- and that was when our up-to-date SAN crashed.
So what happened in January?
They closed the plant permanently.
But we're working to "Get the Fox out of here!". (Say it fast.)
One more month, maybe sooner, and our team's application loses its last DBF file. (All actual VFP code was eliminated months ago.) Goodbye, VfpOleDB.dll!
There's no time like the present. Well, the past used to be.
Early 50's magnetic amplifiers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_amplifier was still in use 30 years later in control circuits for a nuclear power plant. Haze grey and underway.
at the rbwh in brisbane ( australia ) the iv pumps were replaced with muh more modern units ! unfortunetly these extremly modern pumps will pump AIR as well sometimes , so one is in a hospital bed ready at every moment to scream out for a nurse , and have a camera ready to take flashphotos ( people do not like photos of pumps misbehaving ) or crimp the line . this means that those least able to take care of themself are at the mercy of THE LATEST TECH . BP , TEMP ,and a few other things are measured by things , one can not be sure are still working as they should !
the power of men in charge of words over men in charge of machines surpasses all wondering S WEIL
at least it's network was air-gapped
the engineers heavily relied on a remote-reboot mechanism
still running there AFAIK