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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 was working in a system in 2009 which had code commits as far back as 1983.
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
A .NET Web Api 2 web service that runs a borland pascal executable...
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,
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.
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....
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.
The Pixar code base came from Lucasfilm, and went back to the 1970's. Some of that code is still in use.
Bruce Perens.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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!
I've cut a plastic binding with a sharp rock. I didn't knap it myself, it was naturally sharp, but... I don't think it gets much more old school than that ;) Unless there's someone here who made productive use of throwing their own excrement in a production environment.
"You see, Government is a system that is based on weapons." -- Timster
I live in a country thats so old-fashioned they measure things in feet and inches...
I use power point. Does that count?
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
I tried Windows 8 once, does that count?
$
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