Searching for the Oldest Running Application 435
A columnist from InternetWeek has completed a search for the oldest running commercial software application. His results are interesting (note that he's mostly skipping over mainframe applications, just looking at PC-based apps).
It's got to be (Score:5, Funny)
Re:It's got to be (Score:4, Funny)
20 GOTO 10
And this is filler, since my impersonation of pre-shift key BASIC triggered the lameness filter
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Re:It's got to be (Score:5, Interesting)
At least they've upgraded their PCs a few times since then. But the software still runs. It just runs faster (the gear calculator now has the results before the screen refreshes.)
Re:It's got to be (Score:5, Funny)
It was the 3rd grade, what did you expect?
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Re:It's got to be (Score:5, Funny)
That's going to produce 0HELLO WORLD as repeating output, which I don't think is what you want. LN is an uninitialized variable. PRINTLN isn't a valid command, but it'll get interpreted as PRINT LN, which will display as 0.
(The scary part is that I fired up Applewin to verify those results...I was going to fire back ?SYNTAX ERROR IN 10 as a reply. I have no life. :-) )
WordStar (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:WordStar (Score:5, Interesting)
But, by far, the oldest app I've seen was an audio console fader automation system. WordStar may pre-date it in history, but these were 8086 machines with Seagate st-225 20MB hard drives that ran Xenix. They were probably rarely turned off since the early '80s because they recorded and played back the fader movements on an early automated recording console. Everyone was afraid to turn them off in case the hard drives didn't spin back up.
Come to think of it, the timeframes of when the software and hardware was available may place it into the mid- to late- 80s, but I'm sure it caught up for hours running in that time after being powered up for so long.
Re:WordStar (Score:3, Interesting)
Alternatly "joe" in Linux still uses the wordstar command set.
Re:It's got to be (Score:5, Funny)
I always liked... (Score:5, Funny)
10 Print "Shit!";
20 Goto 10
and walking away.
later, that evolved into:
10 Print "Fuck You!!";
20 y$=inkey$:if y$="" OR y$"" then 10
which basicly grabs the 'break' from the buffer before it can be processed, requiring a reboot to clear.
Adding the line (before executing)
basica fuck.bas
to the autoexec.bat ran the program from boot.
Truly evil, we were.
Mainframe (Score:5, Insightful)
That makes a biiig difference. I'm contracted out to a bank that has a mainframe system thats been in operation for around 30 years, beating the program her found.
Re:Mainframe (Score:2)
Re:Mainframe (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Mainframe (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Mainframe (Score:5, Funny)
This is obviously an apocryphal story.
Who can spot the inconsistancy that gives this fakery away?
Exactly.
We all know
Re:Mainframe (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Mainframe (Score:3, Funny)
More like a CRT with wires to a grey box with led's and optical drives? The only reason i have a gf is she hasn't read my browser history.. "Oh, you read slashdot?" (puts shirt back on, walks out door).. Now if she found out i posted as well...
The LEO, redux (Score:3, Informative)
I saved this post from alt.folklore.computers in 1998. Terribly impressive. I'm not sure his age estimate is neccessarily accurate -- the final incarnation of the Leo ceased to be manufactured in the latter half of the 60s, so it may be a bit younger.
On the other hand, I wouldn't put it past some organization having been forced to make something like the orange leo y2k compliant.
Yours Truly,
Jeffrey Boulier
From: Deryk Barker (dbarker@camo
Oldest and most influential.... (Score:4, Funny)
My Dad Still uses Lotus 123 (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:My Dad Still uses Lotus 123 (Score:5, Funny)
You must be new here... [/tongueincheek]
Here's why (Score:2)
Re:My Dad Still uses Lotus 123 (Score:2)
Unfortunately, the PCjr itself died a few years back.
Re: Good for your dad! (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm currently working for a small company that reclaims and refurbishes old Apple Mac systems (everything from the black and white 9" screen SE's and Classics to the first generation of PowerMacs). People give the things to us for free all the time, since they're written off as useless junk. In fact, we're able to get them configured as pretty nice little "starter" systems for students, small children, and public-access machines for the elderly in retirement homes.
Some of the best "classic" games and educational titles of all time ran on these computers, and there's no reason a 3 or 4 year old kid today won't find them just as exciting as kids did back when these machines first came out!
Remember Oregon Trail? How about KidPix, Print Shop Deluxe, Lode Runner, Prince of Persia, and all the Scholastic educational games/software?
For the older folks, there's plenty of great freeware and shareware: monopoly, GNU chess (who even needs a color screen for chess?), backgammon, card games, Shanghai (the matching tile game), and much more.
Claris Works runs quite well on the old Macs too, and gives students a real inexpensive solution for typing papers, not to mention simple spreadsheets.
At some point in time, I plan on putting together a nice system build for old DOS machines too, full of kids' games and educational titles - and see if we can't give some old 8088's and 286/386 machines a new life too.
Those old systems were built like tanks compared to what's offered today. Look at how heavy a real IBM keyboard (or machine) is! Small children aren't going to break one of those as easily as they will some cheap eMachines mini-tower.
Re:My Dad Still uses Lotus 123 (Score:4, Insightful)
Because sometimes there is a better way (Score:4, Informative)
Our university has done this. The physical card catalogue has been completely eliminated, all searches are electronic now. Also, while there are still floors of physical journals, many of the popular ones are available in PDF format for download.
It is amazing how much more efficient it makes research. It's even better because I can tie it in to databases of things that aren't even contained in this particular library.
Some times people get so caught up in the fact that the way they do something "works just fine" that they miss the fact that there is a much more efficient way to do it.
Time marches on (Score:4, Insightful)
Most people don't need to upgrade and become a slave to hype. I'm running everything off a 800 MHz system (4 years) and I intend to squeeze the last drop of energy out of it(8 years or more). I'm not on a more modern system or OS because Mr. Bill Gates slammed the door on my Dragon Dictate system... a 1997 discrete speech program that doesn't get along with XP.
Why would people upgrade these days? High quality RAM, a decent video card and a decent hard drive will handle everything for people that don't give a flying fsck about games and are mature enough to just stay put. I'll probably get a flat panel monitor within the next couple years but that fits with one of my subobjectives--don't get a PC that consumes so much power that it burns my house down.
Re:My Dad Still uses Lotus 123 (Score:2, Informative)
Having a lot of options does not necessarily mean that a program is better suited for a problem than a simple one...
Re:My Dad Still uses Lotus 123 (Score:2)
Re:My Dad Still uses Lotus 123 (Score:5, Interesting)
So we do some investigation and one of the things she'd need is WordPerfect. I don't remember if this was a requirement (like she'd be sending these files digitally) or if it was just the "accepted thing", but we started to research how much it would cost to get her WordPerfect, which we though was sorta asinine since her PC already had Word (came with the machine of course).
Then we found out that you really had to have WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS. You know, the one with the blue screen and a slow, VGA-based preview mode.
Of course I didn't know then how in the world you would even acquire a legitimate copy of that. Or even if it was possible.
We found someone else in the business and asked her why in the world this ancient program was still being used. She told us that the legal and medical professions still use WP5.1 religiously both because everyone's so used to it and because everything in the program since that version just slows them down. Remember, these people are the ones typing the volumes and volumes of legal and medical documents out there. They want productivity and they want it now. They don't want to wait the half second for Word to figure out whatver it's doing in the background to render bullet points.
WordPerfect released WP6 for DOS at one point, probably the most advanced graphical application DOS ever saw. But of course few if anyone wanted that - they either fell into the camp which wanted the lean and mean DOS WP5.1 or the people who were already seeing how nice Windows made everything look already. To this end WordPerfect even released a WP5.1+ to give WP5.1 compatibility with WP5.1 documents. WordPerfect was also pretty good about at least trying to be on every desktop platform, like OS/2 and Linux. WordPerfect was then bought and sold about five times, and for the last three or four major versions has been on board the sinking ship that is Corel. Hell, Corel even tried to pit it on Java at one point.
So the short version of the story is - the reason people don't want to change is that sometimes the options slow them down. Plus there is such a thing as version lock-in syndrome. Ask any psychotic Counter-Strike player which version is better and they'll tell you "man, every release since version (whatever) sucks!"
Re:My Dad Still uses Lotus 123 (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:My Dad Still uses Lotus 123 (Score:3, Funny)
I still find myself wanting to do 'reveal codes' in Word 2000...
A further study might include... (Score:5, Interesting)
Idealy, when programmers write code or engineers design systems, they do it with the ages in mind. While plenty of software developers think that code is throw-away, there are some like myself who like to write enduring code. Perhaps a lot of these ancient systems were just designed so well that their obsolescence is still a long ways off. In that case, the oldest software and hardware is probably to be the most coveted. You usually don't find systems or software today that lasts for decades (and if you're on Microsoft's leash, you're lucky if your software lasts for a year).
It'd be really interesting to see the results. Are these systems really good or are the owners just really lazy?
Re:A further study might include... (Score:5, Insightful)
Knowingly or unknowingly, you have said something really insightful there. I had an "aha" moment after reading your comment. Consider a Microsoft programmer working on Windows 2003. He knows that Microsoft is already working on the new improved Windows 2005, and the developer on Windows 2005 knows that plans are already under way for Windows 2007.
Now where is the motivation to build reliability and security into the system when you know the code you are writing will not have a usage of more than two years (or so Microsoft hopes, since ideally they would like everyone to upgrade to the version du juor instantly).
No wonder the products that come out seem like they were written in a half baked manner.
Re:A further study might include... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:A further study might include... (Score:5, Insightful)
Do you really think they throw it away each time? Unless you're working on something that's pure marketing fluff, code written for one release has a very good chance of being around in the future.
It's a law of nature that code always lives longer than you expect - the cost of throwing things away and rewriting from scratch is almost always worse than the downside of massaging it to deal with the next requirement. It's the mark of good software that it's ameanable to that - unless you're writing a throw-away bit of toy code for yourself, you should assume that anything you check in is probably going to be around in some form for years...
Happened to me recently when doing consultancy work for a company I used to work for 10 years ago. They still have modules which are pretty much unchanged since I wrote them way back when as a new grad, minus the inevitable bug fixes and new features.
Re:A further study might include... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:A further study might include... (Score:4, Interesting)
I manage a facility that does high-end graphics printing, and if I have a printer that is 12 years old and still makes brilliant prints, but it hasn't been marketed in 10 years then no one will write modern software to support it. So I'm "stuck" with DOS. The issue that worries me, then, is massive hadware failure on the PC, cause I have to find a pre-PCI bus computer. The second issue is data format closure ( read proprietary data formats and character settings) until we have ISO character support and XML or open data storage standards we can't have real data portability, and without data portability you are trapped in a legacy codebase. It is probably a well written peice of software ( or you wouldn't have built so much of your company around it) but it is still a trap. PROPRIETARY data formats are always a trap.
Re:A further study might include... (Score:4, Insightful)
TW
Does he use the Spinocylinder? (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah, that's a guy I want to be adjusting my back. Probably doesn't believe in that 'new fangled' aspirin for aches, either.
Re:Does he use the Spinocylinder? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Does he use the Spinocylinder? (Score:3, Funny)
So he's still using opium? Heck, in that case sign me up!
How about you? (Score:3)
Re:How about you? (Score:2)
Re:How about you? (Score:2)
I had the Apple
Re:How about you? (Score:3, Interesting)
I still log vehicle maintenance (oil changes, repairs, etc.) in some spreadsheets under AppleWorks 3.0 (released in 1989). As simple as the data are in the files, I could just move them to text files and edit them with Notepad, but it gives me an excuse to fire up the IIG
lharc.exe (Score:5, Interesting)
The archives are a little larger, and it does not take the longer file names, but for compressing one or two files it is much smaller and much easier to use than old dos PKZip (which needs 3 much larger files to do what lharc.exe does) or any Winzip version.
7zip (Score:2, Informative)
Steven V.
From his previous article ... (Score:3, Funny)
I bet he must have got gazillion entries
The fix is in (Score:2)
What a rip off.
Longest running app? (Score:5, Funny)
got one right on my comp (Score:2)
The 286 was junked 2 years back but the the software still runs in the office on a pentium 100 and my computer too(as a backup). Other than bringing it upto date for y2k, the code is the same.
Slashdotted... (Score:5, Funny)
Scorched Earth myself (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Scorched Earth myself (Score:4, Informative)
MS Flight SImulator (Score:5, Funny)
I'd say 100 years is a fairly long-running app.
Re:MS Flight SImulator (Score:5, Funny)
I guess that would make it 2000 years old now.
How about version numbers? Emacs is on 21.something now. I think AutoCad is up in the 16 range by now.
Re:MS Flight SImulator (Score:3, Informative)
Enjoy,
Lazy IS staff (Score:2, Insightful)
Any large company thats been around a while is going to have a legacy system here or there, its up to the IS staff to interface the old with the new.
Re:Lazy IS staff (Score:2)
One of the problems with upgrading to Excel is that in current and upcomming versions the file format is proprietary and may not lend itself to backwards porting to a format that the programmers can work with. Breaking up Excell workbooks and saving each page as a Lotus Spreadsheet, or better yet a csv file, takes training
Damn (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:10 years?! (Score:2)
Re:10 years?! (Score:2)
Oldest App, or Oldest RUNNING app... (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm thinking it might be much more interesting to throw the mainframes, etc back into the fray, and find the oldest continually running app...
It just might turn out to be a copy of Novell server sitting in somebody's closet, or inside a wall... [techweb.com]
I suppose we'd need to qualify exactly what an application is, and perhaps we'd find an example where it didn't meet the criteria when switched on way-back-when, but has had bits added to it along the way, and now does?
Re:Oldest App, or Oldest RUNNING app... (Score:2)
Old software... (Score:2, Interesting)
This program was written by the people at InfoGames for internal use in the early 80s and then sold as a product starting in 1984 or so.
I was called in when his Pentium-class machine he'd been running dos 6.2 on died and he needed either a replacement or the program hacked to run on newer OSes. It turned out that it would not run on FAT32 or NTFS partitions, o
DOS databases... (Score:2)
how about... (Score:2)
Re:how about... (Score:2)
robi
My Mom (Score:2)
I've always used Macs, and tried to tell her how much easier the GUI the GUI would make everything. (Though I didn't know how to get all of her old files onto the new PC with that tiny 3.5 floppy.) Then I w
Re:My Mom (Score:5, Interesting)
In a way, I think Windows took a step backwards when they eliminated MS-DOS and made Windows the whole OS. I mean, getting rid of the old 16-bit DOS code made sense, but things might have been more flexible if they just put some work into a major DOS upgrade - and made Windows '9x launch from DOS optionally, like Win 3.x did.
Look at all the work MS had to put into making the DOS compatibility layer run as many older apps as possible. Instead of that, I would have preferred a Win environment with no "DOS commnand prompt" or "DOS box" of any kind. If you want to run DOS apps, you just do it without typing "win" to start Windows up.
The GUI does make things easier for *desktop publishing*, where you're working with multiple fonts and graphics interspersed with your text. For "typewriter simulating", like most offices still do with their computers, a GUI is just needless overhead!
Oldest Source code i could find ... (Score:2, Interesting)
** SUN.C Version 1.0 Michael Schwartz December 25, 1984
I've only modified it slightly to correct for float and double. I still use it in my Home Automation software to calculate Sunrise/Sunset. Hey it works well.
Quicken 5 (Score:2)
Jason
ProfQuotes [profquotes.com]
Is your application running? (Score:3, Funny)
n00b!
We just stopped using... (Score:2)
Lotus 123R3 (DOS),
We had (up 'til last month) a Win 3.1 machine (a 486) on our network (Great Plains Dynamics for DOS),
and within the last 3 years have finally killed off the old Novell 3.12 servers (replaced with Novell 5 and 6).
You want old? We got old...
It's SyncSort (Score:5, Informative)
SyncSort was the first useful sort program to break the O(N log N) barrier (yes, this is possible, CS101 kiddies). This was a huge win for mainframe shops with their big tape-to-tape sort jobs. That's what all those spinning tape reels were doing on early computers. SyncSort cut days off some batch jobs.
You can buy current versions of SyncSort. The old versions for IBM mainframes are still available, and you can get it as an Active-X control for Windows. So that's a 34-year old product, little changed in decades and still doing a useful job today.
I did maintenance programming on a competitive product, UNIVAC Exec II Sort/Merge, around 1969. SyncSort was faster. They really did have a better, and patented, algorithm.
Re:It's SyncSort (Score:5, Informative)
Just because it uses radix sort it doesn't mean it isn't O(N log N). The radix itself is O(log N); you have to look at each entry at least once.
Remember, we're talking theoretical issues here (since you brought up the O(.) notation).
Go outside (Score:5, Insightful)
Remember, only in the Western world is software/hardware cheap when measured against the cost of living.
In India, for example, a cheap PC would cost more than what most people earn in a month. I bet there would be many schools and homes with old PCs and software simply because it costs too much to upgrade.
Norton Commander for DOS (Score:5, Interesting)
If I still had an older version, it did most of the same stuff in about 53k. it was from around 1985.
Oldest running must be running! (Score:2, Informative)
There was reciently the longest running computer hunt and now i suppose they want the longest running application. Im sure its going to be a database or a print or file server of some kind but you never know, someone may still have Word running a
NT4 Uptime? (Score:4, Insightful)
Just the far end of the bell curve? A quick photoshop job on the screenshots? Or... maybe Windows is of some use as a server OS after all?
Re:NT4 Uptime? (Score:5, Interesting)
That's like being proud of a UNIX/Linux server for having a 3-year uptime when all it does is serve ntp queries! The lack of a power interruption is more impressive than the machine staying up.
TeX (Score:4, Interesting)
TeX has a horrible syntax and funky limitations, but there are so many available packages for it (such as LaTeX and the associated packages) as well as external applications (BibTeX) and tons of mathematical files made for it that it just cannot be replaced.
Some crazy people [eleves.ens.fr] even use TeX to [cof.ens.fr]
typeset a newspaper and a personnel directory.
Law Firms (Score:3, Interesting)
IIRC, Juris was written in 1986, or something like that. The company that makes it was getting ready to roll out a "test" version now featuring - WINDOWS support. *Gasp!* This was a few years ago.
I wager that the oldest running application is probably in a factory somewhere, producing something very low tech. Like an 8088 hooked up to a lathe trimming brown rubber toilet plunger bulbs. Those manufacturing guys rarely upgrade, and arguably never need to.
pay at INRIA (Score:2)
Re:pay at INRIA (Score:3, Funny)
that's nothing (Score:3, Funny)
Embedded software lasts longest (Score:4, Interesting)
Oldest running Apple apps .. that are STILL in use (Score:5, Interesting)
But, how old is Visicalc [about.com] for the Apple II IIe or even I - wasn't it the first app for the Apple or maybe Turtle?
I believe the date for these programs would be 1977. (Visicalc 1979)
I know of several college professors at Clemson that use Apple IIe's for milk volume analysis and "calling" the cows in for milking at the Lamaster dairy Agricultural arm of Clemson too. I also know one professor that still uses VisiCalc.
And the rest of the world? (Score:5, Interesting)
This was 1994-ish and the IT guy there told me that they had been running that thing for about 7 years. That means it had been in use since '87 or so.
About four months ago I got an email from one of my old subcontractors, who is now employed full time at that hospital (which is not small anymore). His note was unrelated to this application, which I did not touch or otherwise use. He was asking me somethng about one of the other systems I did work on there. But he mentioned it in passing, and I just remembered when I saw this article.
So that means that they've been using it for the better part of 15-16 years.
When you're third world, you tend to keep stuff around until it breaks =)
I win (Score:3, Funny)
Oh, man... (Score:3, Interesting)
About 5 years back (maybe longer) I worked for a company that moved off an HP 1000 for their cad/cam and accounting/payroll for the sewing plant.
Know what finally did the HP 1000 in? Not backups, not parts, not software or ability to function...but politics!
(sigh) {
Was a few more paragraphs that got eaten from clicking a link in my mail client...frack! grrr!}
.
"Oldest" type stuff (Score:4, Insightful)
Tandy 102 (Score:3, Insightful)
It still works, and its spreadsheet easily uses relative cell references. That nifty little feature seems to have gotten lost in MS's spreadsheets between then and now. Today, one of my cow orkers needed to do something in a spreadsheet ... ``relative references!'' I told him. Half an hour later, none of us could figure out how to do it in Excel.
Sometimes, the old stuff is good enough to warrent putting up with its limitations. In this case, maybe not. But MS's spreadsheets have gone way downhill since the early '80's.
They need a decent Novell admin! (Score:3, Insightful)
Novell has not moved away from IPX. It has been and still will be supported in future versions. I'm teaching 6.0 and it still uses IPX/SPX for several functions. They need an admin with a clue!
Neumann still uses a Commodore PET (Score:4, Interesting)
They also used a 40+ year old measurement microphone to calibrate it.
burris
Old source (Score:5, Interesting)
Character is important. (Score:3, Interesting)
Here at my job, we have such a mixture of different computers dating from the '70's to just two months ago. To squeeze every possible bit of value out of the money we spend, this company has never put a computer out of commission, partly because doing so could wreak havoc on our system, considering how ad hoc it is, characteristic of things that started out small and then grew, and grew, and grew. That's how our network is... and nobody around here is brave enough to make drastic changes.
Besides, we've got a huge investment in various software packages and custom programs that translate data between them. These run on so many different hardware configurations and operating systems that it isn't even funny.
In fact, the way some computers are attached to each other is funny... there are the old coaxial cables, there are newer cat5 cables, there are RS232 cables and "LapLink" cables. Hell, there are even little boards that one of our guys here built in his garage some years ago, to get some of our older dinosaurs communicating. Each of these things was put into place one by one, to solve a very particular short term problem, each turned into a very permanent part of our organization, and all are still functional and are being used extensively.
There are a bunch of newer boxes here, made out of computer scraps that people have "donated" over the years, running Linux, and in my spare time I like to write scripts to automate all kinds of repetitive tasks. I like the way our network is because it gives the thing a lot of character, kind of like old towns have, as opposed to cities that are engineered onto a huge grid. And I like to think of this network as a town in the wild west... It's so much fun to screw around with these petty things, but then, we all bring our junk cars and old hot rods into work on the weekends to fix them, or to take parts off and sell them; we all have this way of doing petty little shit all the time, and believe me, we love every moment of it!
Re:When Microsoft was open source ... (Score:2)
IIRC it was two sides of a 5.25 floppy, each side of the floppy holding one of the two compiler stages.
Of course I never did anything useful with it, other than compiling brickout and being amazed at how unplayable it had become.
Re:Air Traffic control (Score:3, Interesting)