Ask HN: What's the oldest piece of software still in use? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: What's the oldest piece of software still in use?

#41

Post by tjr » Tue, Jul 30, 2013, 1:42 PM UTC

jonnathanson wrote: post #31

Let's define "still in use," because that's the heart of the question. Technically speaking, I'm sure someone could dig an Apple IIc out of storage somewhere and successfully run a game on it. Hell, someone out there might be doing that right now. To me, that anecdotal experience doesn't translate into "in use." I'd define "in use" to mean still in productive service to a group of people or institutions significant e…

Similarly: I worked on some avionics networking software a few years back, written in C, and a surprisingly old version of GCC (I think from the late 1990's, in 2006-2007, so approximately a decade old then) was being used. That particular version had already been qualified for avionics development at the company, and to upgrade to a newer version would have meant assuming the cost of requalification.

Just so long as the old compiler worked well enough, they had no reason to upgrade. (I did uncover a bug in the compiler which I had to work around, but wasn't enough to warrant an upgrade.)

Re: Ask HN: What's the oldest piece of software still in use?

#42

Post by Tinned_Tuna » Tue, Jul 30, 2013, 1:42 PM UTC

I know that some of the British Ports systems are running something written in Delphi 5 that's around 20 - 25 years old for their tickets.

Re: Ask HN: What's the oldest piece of software still in use?

#43

Post by pcdavid » Tue, Jul 30, 2013, 1:44 PM UTC

The (probably very small) pieces of software on-board the Pioneer 10? It was launched in 1973 and has certainly never been touched since.

Re: Ask HN: What's the oldest piece of software still in use?

#44

Post by gabipurcaru » Tue, Jul 30, 2013, 1:46 PM UTC

Not that old, but I always found it interesting that we learned C/C++ in highschool using a version of Borland from 1993, which made the program as old as myself.

Re: Ask HN: What's the oldest piece of software still in use?

#45

Post by yaddayadda » Tue, Jul 30, 2013, 1:46 PM UTC

edw519 wrote: post #20

I wrote the lot traceability module of Compufact's ERP package in 1987. 3 years ago, I engaged a company that still used that software. Just for fun, I searched for my initials in their repository. Good news: that software was still being used. Not so good news: one of my programs had been changed 120 times, including bug fixes. I pretended that it was written by another "edw".

So over 26 years, there have been 120 edits? Including bug fixes? Which means not all 120 edits were bug fixes, presumably it included other things like feature enhancements? That's less than 5 changes a year on average for a 26 year old program. In my book, unless you're working on a life-or-death system or a space-bound system [1], less than 5 changes a year over 26 years is something to be proud of!

[1] And no one individual programmer should be solely responsible for life-or-death systems or space-bound systems.

Re: Ask HN: What's the oldest piece of software still in use?

#46

Post by vacri » Tue, Jul 30, 2013, 1:47 PM UTC

gkrellm-bfm. It has had a couple of patches in the past 10 years, so it's not strictly a fair candidate, but they were trivial.

bfm is 'bubblefishymon', a system monitor that packs a lot of info into a picture, being that of a fish tank. The level of the water represents RAM usage, the amount of bubbles indicates CPU usage, fish moving leftwards is network traffic in, fish moving rightwards is network traffic out, and there's even a floating rubber duck... which represents a duck!

Re: Ask HN: What's the oldest piece of software still in use?

#47

Post by noonespecial » Tue, Jul 30, 2013, 1:49 PM UTC

shubb wrote: post #35

noonespecial wrote: post #10

We use DOS programs within virtual machines to process data that comes in on 1/2" tape from government sources and return it to them on DVD's. The oldest of these would be mid 80's I guess. Edit: Changed "in-virtuo" to "within virtual machines" for clarity.

The science lot usually call simulation 'In silico' in their papers. Personally, unnecessary latin makes me cringe.

You're probably right. I can still edit, I'll change for clarity.

Re: Ask HN: What's the oldest piece of software still in use?

#48

Post by kotnik » Tue, Jul 30, 2013, 1:50 PM UTC

Canadian nuclear industry has committed to continue the use of PDP-11 until 2050. I guess they have some software there running from 70s. Here's a recent ad for PDP-11 assembly coders they're in dire need of:

http://www.vintage-computer.com/vcforum/showthread.php?37827...

Re: Ask HN: What's the oldest piece of software still in use?

#49

Post by TheBeardKing » Tue, Jul 30, 2013, 1:51 PM UTC

In military maintenance we use loads of software developed in the 70s on old test stations. These programs slowly get rehosted to newer testers, or until the systems under test go obsolete.

Where I work we have hundreds of engineers programming in Teradyne's LASAR software, rehosting old programs onto new digital test platforms. LASAR was developed in the mid 80s and we have it running on VAX and UNIX servers. Since electronics no longer use combinational logic in discrete chips, no newer software is available.

Re: Ask HN: What's the oldest piece of software still in use?

#50

Post by anywherenotes » Tue, Jul 30, 2013, 1:52 PM UTC

At work we have character-cell UI for financials. New applications plug in dynamically into the UI. I don't know how old the UI is, but company started in '78, and I believe that was their first UI. There are various new UI's, but power users run in character cell - it's fastest and all features enabled.