41–50 of 82 posts
Also, there's a 7-year-old Solaris machine which hosts the entire administrative database, with no fallback.
I might as well claim my trophy now. Where is it?
Edit: We also have several SPARC Classics running some pre-2.5.1 version that are doing phone switch stuff.
15 years old. It runs Win 95 and is used to build a version of one of our products that stops shipping this summer. It uses a 3rd party control that cannot be installed elsewhere as the vendor has gone out of business and the product has an aggressive anti-copying mechanism. It was the only machine remaining that could build the product (the others died or were upgraded by mistake over the years), and the replacement…
I have an old Pentium II 300MHz PC from the late 90s with 128MB of memory. I'm not sure when exactly it was first purchased, since I first got it second hand off of someone else in 2003. I added a new ethernet card in 2003 when I got it, and the CD drive has been replaced since, but other than that it's the original hardware (including 15" CRT monitor). The hard drive died long ago, but it doesn't need one to do its…
And I have a windows box currently running win 2k that dates from the days of windows NT 3.5. It is in daily use.
About 2 months ago I retired an old gateway PC that has 32 meg of memory and is from about 1990. Until the, it was running OpenBSD/pf as one of my main firewalls. I am sure it still boots. It was taken out of service as that particular internet line is not longer in use. And I have a windows box currently running win 2k that dates from the days of windows NT 3.5. It is in daily use.
I 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)
Agreed, though startups also like to cut costs, and old stuff can be free. A lot of the hackers I know who still hang around the fringes of academia have some crazy old hardware salvaged from university skips etc that still works and is used reliably - usually, to echo the thread above, as a router or similar.
They are very very helpful, and I plan to use them to the death before going live and have to spend any €€€. They are all in my kitchen, with a perfect Qnap NAS for the backups.
My uncle, who is a radio engineer, still occasionally boots up his TRS-80 Model 4 (1983) because it's got some piece of software he hasn't been able to find a suitable replacement for. It looks so out of place sitting on his desk next to his flatscreen.
Our lab has an old 486 which still runs MS-DOS 6.2 as its primary OS. Why? Because it's got a bunch of proprietary hardware in its guts that runs our differential scanning calorimeter, for which there are no modern drivers and no replacement hardware exists. Sure we could buy a new DSC, but the damn thing still works ...