If by production you mean a mission-critical computer and not just a server in a datacenter, one of my previous companies has 486s with DOS still running machine tools (manufacturing equipment). It's amazing how long a computer can last when it cost a million bucks originally (with attached hardware, of course).
Ask HN: What is the oldest computer that you still use for production?
61–70 of 82 posts
Re: Ask HN: What is the oldest computer that you still use for production?
#62At my brother's office. Pentium II, 128MB running running SBCL ~0.8x and Allegro Serve on Slackware 7.0 (still on a 2.2 kernel, IIRC)
What's Allegro Serve serving?
Re: Ask HN: What is the oldest computer that you still use for production?
#63At an old job, maybe 5 years ago, we still had an old 286 full tower with a 1200baud modem (running an old x86 unix) which was used as a dial-up file server... I doubt it's still in use today.
Re: Ask HN: What is the oldest computer that you still use for production?
#64My Toshiba Satellite Pro has a Celeron 497 MHz processor which Intel produced in 1999. It has been used almost daily since then, upgraded to XP but with the same 10 gig HD.
I still follow 1500 stocks with Lotus 1-2-3 for DOS (please, no codger jokes). I use a Python script to download daily Yahoo stock data and Lotus reads the resulting CSV data. Any changes to my stocks are written to a python database by Lotus also. As a wag said, if it works, don't fix it.
Re: Ask HN: What is the oldest computer that you still use for production?
#65I wouldn't expect too many people here have old stuff because 1) it's a fairly young group and 2) startups get to start fresh. Of course there'll likely be a few exceptions, too, that might be interesting. edw519 probably has something that he has to feed paper tapes to regularly:-) ("Piqued my curiosity", BTW)
I think that the Linksys WRTG was what sounded the death-knell for lots of old hardware. It used to be the case that the oldest, cheapest box you had ended up as a router/firewall and since the thing never really needed to hit disk it would probably keep running until the PCBs turned to dust. I used to routinely use old 486 and first-gen Pentiums as cheap gateway boxes but now I will just flash a new bit of firmware into a wireless base station and toss the old hardware.
Re: Ask HN: What is the oldest computer that you still use for production?
#66I do my FreeBSD testing on a 10 year old box.
Re: Ask HN: What is the oldest computer that you still use for production?
#67The oldest computer I use on a regular basis is the ECU in my 1990 Honda Accord. If that doesn't count (and I see no reason why it shouldn't!) then the oldest is probably a server which I think is about 6 years old now.
That should count. In that case I know of an old 1986 BMW ECU that I used for testing, in my days as an engineer at Bosch. I suppose it still exists there, since they still need to support old vehicles for their diagnostic devices.
Re: Ask HN: What is the oldest computer that you still use for production?
#68An EC2 instance that's been running for 48 days :)
Re: Ask HN: What is the oldest computer that you still use for production?
#69I have no idea how old the systems are behind this data point but it seems relevant nonetheless: there are apparently 200-300 billion lines of COBOL still in production : http://www.enterpriseinnovation.net/content/how-should-gover... This showed up here a while back and is also an interesting read: http://fosspatents.blogspot.com/2010/08/western-civilization... Sometimes in all my eagerness to keep up and constantly…
That's slightly less impressive when you remember that it takes about 1,000 lines of Cobol to write Hello, World.
Re: Ask HN: What is the oldest computer that you still use for production?
#70At my brother's office. Pentium II, 128MB running running SBCL ~0.8x and Allegro Serve on Slackware 7.0 (still on a 2.2 kernel, IIRC)
What's Allegro Serve serving?
Phone log software for the receptionists. They take down messages, message details and any questions. He calls back clients, or gives the phone operators response "scripts" to answer those questions themselves. Except the script is fed back into the app, a long with a meaningful phrasing of the question, and next time a similar question comes up they have a canned answer.
This was my first web app, circa 2002, IIRC. If I did it today I would make it into a full blown knowledge management system with keyword lookups.
The whole thing must have been a few hundred lines of lousy newbie CL.