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).
My Dad Still uses Lotus 123 (Score:5, Interesting)
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?
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.
Re:Mainframe (Score:4, Interesting)
Damn (Score:3, Interesting)
WordStar (Score:3, Interesting)
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?
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, or in Windows in general due to memory handling, but ran just fine under VirtualPC 5 (MacOS X 10.2) with a <2GB partition.
Just for kicks, I moved him almost entirely over to the Mac and set up one of his Win95 machines to run it in dos-mode as a back-up. After using it for the last 15 years, I doubt they'll ever change. Inertia in the officeplace is a scary thing.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 =)
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!}
.
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: 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: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.
Not real old, but old enough... ~1987 (Score:2, 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: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!
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 IIGS. (It also got some use when I wrote some software (and built some hardware) a few months ago to use an Apple II as a programmable temperature controller for my beer fridge.)
Re:WordStar (Score:2, Interesting)
He insists it's easier to use than Word or whatever.
Easier than learning new tricks, perhaps.
Re:My Dad Still uses Lotus 123 (Score:2, Interesting)
Neumann still uses a Commodore PET (Score:4, Interesting)
They also used a 40+ year old measurement microphone to calibrate it.
burris
Re:WordStar (Score:3, Interesting)
Alternatly "joe" in Linux still uses the wordstar command set.
Old source (Score:5, Interesting)
Mac Toasters (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:How about you? -Yardi Property Mgt- (Score:2, Interesting)
My wife and I figure that a fairly simple spreadsheet would probably do the trick these days, but he won't part with it. As he argues (and I can't find fault with it, really), it works, so why mess with it...
I'd have moved him to AppleWin long ago if I still had the bits and pieces I needed to transfer the disk images, but alas...
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:NT4 Uptime? (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Air Traffic control (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Law Firms (Score:2, Interesting)