
If It Ain't Broke, Don't Fix It: Ancient Computers in Use Today - geekam
http://www.pcworld.com/article/249951/if_it_aint_broke_dont_fix_it_ancient_computers_in_use_today.html
======
kingmanaz
A 25-year old Amiga 2000 still provides background music at home (when the
wife is away). A couple hundred megs of Mod files provide hours of nostalgia.
Some people meditate with incense, Amigans ruminate to the sounds of 80s
tracker beats.

Here's a sample of a great mod: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dZWgXiVJbpI>
\- albeit from a lame demo. There are thousands more available at aminet.net.

I've tried replacing the machine with emulation, but there is something
comforting in seeing the old girl in the corner serving as well as she ever
did. Perhaps devices living beyond their natural lifespans comforts man's
worries over his own perishable nature.

~~~
apaprocki
For me, Unreal ][ music never gets old :)

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dmhtc5S4atU>

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cpNGBzd2SLE>

~~~
jebblue
Unreal rocks! My son put me onto Sunvox, pretty cool:
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Row2VYpz2pY>

------
johnohara
Back in the late 80's, early 90's, a friend of mine bought some used
PDP-11/70's from Illinois Bell. He'd sell them as parts into the aftermarket
and did okay. Not great but steady.

He kept one in his detached garage that would load the initial bootstrap and
then prompt the console for the operating system, which he didn't have. From
that point on it patiently waited for a response and was used to heat the
garage.

~~~
ilikejam
That makes me feel kind of sad. A once-mighty machine waiting hopefully in the
dark for an Operator to load a tape.

$

But the Operators never arrive.

~~~
Aloha
wow, this comment made me whimper a little inside.

~~~
andrewflnr
Grab some tissues. <http://xkcd.com/695/>

~~~
Aloha
not fair!

------
laumars
Last month I had the pleasure I of seeing a Dekatron[1] in action (for those
that don't know, a dekatron is a decimal based computer, rather than binary).
The machine in question is the oldest working computer in the world (older
machines like the Colossus are actually reconstructions) and uses relays
rather than valves. It was a true sight to see in action as the relays spin
round with a hypnotic orange glow[2]

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harwell_computer>

[2] <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVgc8ksstyg> (the video doesn't really do
it justice)

~~~
jrabone
Relays don't glow. Those are dekatron[1] gas-discharge (neon) tubes, the
machine version of the human-readable Nixie lamps.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dekatron>

~~~
laumars
Ah yes. I'm getting myself in a muddle as WITCH was/is a relay-based dekatron
computer. (how that all hangs together is beyond me. But it looked immense).

------
lmm
It may not be "broke", but a lot of the time with these ancient systems
ongoing maintenance costs more than replacement would - but quarterly
accounting ensures anyone who did the smart thing would be punished for it.

~~~
derefr
> quarterly accounting ensures anyone who did the smart thing would be
> punished for it

It occurs to me--is there some sort of financial instrument a company could
buy (or sell) which would incentivize them to take a longer-term view of their
own performance?

The one thing that comes to mind is Enron's scheme of selling debt backed by
the integral of future projected profits from an energy contract, and then
writing that debt-asset down as current-quarter earnings. It _did_ overvalue
their stock, but it also locked them into a model where contracts with
declining long-term outlooks would force a loss, rather than just a declining
gain.

That doesn't seem like a glowing recommendation, I admit--but an overvalue of
the stock in this case could actually be the "economically correct" value; it
could just be incorporating the company's potential upside for being forced to
take a longer-term view, and rewarding the participants for taking on
increased downside risk.

The stock price, in an _efficient_ market (that is, one that understands what
it's investing in, unlike what happened with Enron) would also be offset with
lower demand due to said increased risk--but a company _could_ still come out
slightly better off for establishing these instruments. It just comes down to
whether other short-term _investors_ actually value a company that "goes long"
more than a regular quarter-to-quarter-earnings one.

~~~
drcube
>It occurs to me--is there some sort of financial instrument a company could
buy (or sell) which would incentivize them to take a longer-term view of their
own performance?

ESOP. When the stockholders are the employees, quarterly earnings take a back
seat to making sure the company will still be successful 30 years from now
when they retire.

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Employee_ownership>

~~~
jacques_chester
The intersection of public finance and constitutional democracy suggests that
nope, this wouldn't work either.

------
jdechko
I didn't see this anywhere in the comments, so here it is.

I think it's really cool that some of these machines are still running just
fine after 25-50+ years, and while I agree with the sentiment, it really
scares me as a user, and would even more if I were a business owner. I
couldn't even make it past the first section.

We spend all this time talking about data portability, using open, non-
proprietary formats, and redundant backups. A fire could wipe out everything,
as it would be a huge undertaking to either reproduce a copy for offsite
archival (which is already likely the case). What happens when the machine
breaks beyond repair and a replacement can't be found?

I'm all for repurposing old hardware, extending the useful life of machinery
and not upgrading just because. But modern computing systems have huge
advantages including physical data size, redundancy and search, among others.
Not to mention that even if the Sparkles decided to move to a modern system,
the data would have to be transferred manually.

~~~
JPKab
They should have just called the article "Old Computers in use at companies
where managment is to stupid to see how much money they are wasting and how
much risk they are introducing"

The chemical company in Texas is a prime example: "They use it because its a
known entity."

Wow.

~~~
blablabla123
> "They use it because its a known entity."

I would assume that this is the single reason outdated systems continue to
exist. People who are using the old systems and feel confident with them. If
you want, you can find for any legacy system a person who would be willing to
take the risk to replace it. But that would also mean losing control for the
existing maintainers...

~~~
angersock
One wonders if IBM currently has a still-active support contract for that box.

~~~
brokenparser
Make that two.

------
angdis
Yep, you know you've gone too far with "legacy support" when you get a visit
from the Computer History Museum !

------
sputknick
I used one of those DEC VAX machines when I was in the military. When
considering when they were built they have REALLY REALLY nice GUI. They were
built around the time of the first Macs and their interface is significantly
higher resolution and more user freindly than those first Macs. They are
really nice machines and not terribly big (roughly the size of a small
refrigerator).

~~~
ovi256
The money that you paid for one of those first Macs wouldn't buy you a power
supply for a DEC VAX. So it's remarkable that Apple managed to commercialize
GUIs at a price for the masses, even if their version had lower specs.

------
ChuckMcM
At the turn of the century there were hundreds of DEC machines of various
flavors that were "tossed out" because DEC's new owners (Compaq I believe at
that time) would not "certify" them as Y2K compliant. I ended up with a
complete collection of every q-bus based MicroVAX ever produced, from the
MicroVAX 1 through the VAX 4000-770. That represented a range of performance
from .1 VUPs (VAX Unit of Performance) to about 100 VUPS or three decimal
orders of magnitude.

~~~
jff
Spoiler: Yeah, they were Y2K compliant.

I got a VAX post-Y2K and ran VMS and NetBSD just fine.

~~~
derleth
> Spoiler: Yeah, they were Y2K compliant.

The OSes were, but what about the apps in common use?

It's the same thing on ancient microcomputers: As far as I know, the C64's
ROM-based OS doesn't care about the date at all, but various application
software likely did, and would probably get very confused at two-digit years
which began with a first digit less than 7.

------
ericcholis
Single Page Version:
[http://www.pcworld.com/article/249951/if_it_aint_broke_dont_...](http://www.pcworld.com/article/249951/if_it_aint_broke_dont_fix_it_ancient_computers_in_use_today.html?page=0)

------
jlarocco
A few years ago I (briefly) worked for a defense contractor maintaining Jovial
and assembly language code for an embedded system using 286 processors and
running iRMX.

Work was in progress to create the next generation using more modern hardware
and software, but the old system had to be kept up and enhanced until the new
version was finished and deployed to all of the remote sites. The biggest
impetus for change was the difficulty in finding replacement parts for such
obsolete hardware.

Unfortunately, an emulator just wasn't an option. Being a real time system,
the timing constraints were too strict. Think of the old DOS games that became
insanely fast on more modern hardware, but with more significant consequences.
For better or worse, I saw sections of code where there would be, say 16 no-op
instructions, and a comment like "The following 16 no-ops give the bit-sync
just enough time to finish adjusting before the real signal arrives". Tracking
down all the timing dependencies and verifying they still worked on an
emulator would have been a nightmare, and probably more difficult than
creating a new system from scratch on modern hardware.

All of the dev tools were hosted on a VAX system. Fortunately, this one was
able to use an emulator, and it actually ran significantly faster than the
real system, and increased compile time dramatically. They still kept the real
VAX around in the data center, but at some point the replacement parts and
system maintenance costs became too expensive.

------
wrs
I toured a US missile sub a few years back with a group from Microsoft. We
went into the launch control room and saw a Windows PC running NT 3.51 (or
maybe 4) on the control desk. Our reaction was, let's just say, extreme
surprise.

The two guys in the room (I'm guessing that room is _always_ manned, even
during a refit) immediately understood our concern. "No no," they said,
"that's not the missile computer. _That's_ the missile computer." They pointed
behind us at a giant grey metal cabinet. I imagine the technology was from
around 1980, but from the look of it I wouldn't have been surprised to find
vacuum tubes inside.

We were all quite relieved to find that nuclear missiles are controlled by an
old computer that presumably doesn't receive security bug patches on a weekly
basis.

~~~
james2vegas
If it looked vaguely like NT with a Windows 95 look, it probably was NT 4, as
3.51 only had the Windows 95 shell with the Shell Technology Preview,
otherwise it ran Program Manager/File Manager.

------
davidroberts
In 2001, I was going from one Intel factory to another, teaching Nikon
technicians about VMS, which ran on the Alpha stations Nikon was still putting
into its steppers (big machines used to make computer chips). They switched
over to Windows NT and Linux a few years later, but I'm sure many of those
VMS-based steppers are still operating.

~~~
vidarh
(Open)VMS was still being developed, sold and commercially supported at that
time and several years afterwards, and HP still offers commercial support and
made (so far) last release in 2010, so that's not so "ancient". HP also kept
selling Alpha based hardware until at least 2007.

~~~
driverdan
2007 or 2008 sounds about right for when the Alpha groups were shut down. My
dad worked in the Alpha memory group and lost his job around then.

------
WalterBright
My Carver amp & preamp stereo still plays all day every day and has for the
last 30 years. I'll be sad when it finally fails. It's driving some old
Dahlquist speakers of the same vintage, also working forever. A couple of the
best purchases I ever made.

About the only change is I no longer use a CD player, cassette player, etc.,
but drive it from an Audiotron box that sucks the tunes off of my computer.
The Audiotron is > 10 years old, and I still haven't found anything better.

(The Carver amp on-off switch did wear out last year, but I just plugged it
into a bus strip to use as the switch.)

------
rdl
The punchcard system surprised me, but I've seen plenty of Apple II and C64
systems used as standalone in small businesses, and various minicomputers are
quite understandable (although most of the normal environment VAX stuff got
moved to Alphas in the 1990s, which aren't that horrible from a maintenance
perspective).

~~~
angdis
IBM system-Z mainframes can and do run 20-30+ year old software that was
written for previous IBM mainframes. There's an interesting podcast about them
on se-radio: [http://www.se-radio.net/2012/03/episode-184-the-mainframe-
wi...](http://www.se-radio.net/2012/03/episode-184-the-mainframe-with-jeff-
frey/)

~~~
Shivetya
IBM seems to have a penchant for that, their series i computers run software
written for even the previous system/36 and system/38. The i relies on a
Technology-Independent Machine Interface to allow the hardware to change
without requiring code changes at the software, for many release upgrades user
written code simply is recompiled when the upgrade is done without source
being needed or user action.

~~~
angersock
Yeah, the backward-compatibility lengths that IBM goes to are something
amazing and wonderful to behold. I think a lot of developers these days don't
appreciate the crazy work that into supporting bytecode from before they were
born.

------
doug4hn
I've kept every single computer I've owned. Still thrilled with how well my
Zeos 386 notebook (from the early 90's) works w/ Linux and that ultra thin
Sharp PC-UM10 (from '01) that looks like a small MacBook Air and has an 8-hour
battery life.

~~~
zokier
> Still thrilled with how well my Zeos 386 notebook (from the early 90's)
> works w/ Linux

That won't last long, 386 support was removed from mainline kernel.

~~~
doug4hn
Yeah, don't plan on upgrading. Really little more than a "glorified
typewriter", but still very cute & light.

------
gambiting
Apparently Polish National Rail(PKP) still uses a 40 year old Odra computer
for train logging at one of their stations:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odra_(computer)>

Edit: No, apparently it was switched off in 2010, I remember talking to
somebody from their IT department back in 2008 when that computer was
functioning, didn't know that they actually shut it down now.

------
caf
A couple of years ago I wandered down the wrong aisle in one of our data
centres and came upon a Data General Eclipse still powered up and apparently
in use.

~~~
jrabone
Reading "The Soul of a New Machine" [1], the story of building the successor
to the Eclipse, when I was 13/14 was what made me want to work with computers,
although I couldn't decide whether hardware or software was cooler. DEC had
already won by that point, though. I even acquired a DEC Rainbow 100+ as my
first "PC" (it was a hybrid 8088 / Z80 which could boot DEC's DOS or CP/M).

A couple of years ago my father and I scrapped the last of the Rainbows (not
rare enough for a museum to be interested) and a Micro PDP 11/23 (no interest
from museums or UK PDP enthusiasts, and too hard to ship internationally). It
was a sad day.

[1] <http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0679602615>

~~~
ChuckMcM
You know, you get points for reading the book but lose points for buying a
Rainbow :-) (kidding) Fortunately you didn't buy the PDP-11 version which ran
the "Personal Operating System" (which was a lobotomized version of RSX-11,
and aptly abbreviated to POS)

I agree that its a great book, these days it would be much less dramatic with
everything running on simulators prior to chip tapeout.

~~~
jrabone
Haha, the Rainbow was a skip-rescue, as was the PDP (which rain RSX-11M). Even
came with the "orange wall" of manuals. Made a nice space heater, and we had
fun running RS232 all over the house to attach terminals to it. Sadly it
didn't have a compiler, only Macro-11...

------
eddyystop
I started my first job in 1974. My first project was to migrate apps running
one of those 402 unit record machines (plus an attached adder/subtracter, plus
a multiplier/divider/square-rooter) to IBM mainframes. There were a lot of
those patch panels, one for each app. So my first step was to write a 402
patch panel emulator. ;) This freed up the floor space we needed to rewrite
the apps properly. Quite a difference from nodejs and Angular SPAs.

------
jschuur
'If It Ain't Broke, Don't Fix It': said by IT departments everywhere
responsible for the prevalence of old browsers versions in enterprise
businesses.

~~~
mpyne
They could still be right, though. Keep IE6 for that piece-of-shit enterprise
web apps and _still install_ Chrome or Firefox for the rest of your work.

IE6 just becomes the shell to the webapp instead of a browser in its own
right. MS probably even has a way to install multiple versions of IE
concurrently so you could run IE6 + "modern IE".

~~~
dave5104
Actually, this is something I've been curious about for awhile: I know "modern
IE" comes with developer tools that allow you to switch IE versions, and
essentially look at the site at hand as if you were using IE8 or IE7, all the
way down to IE6. From my understanding, a website can manually trigger this
switch by using a special <meta> tag. Can't these legacy systems that only
work in IE6 simply use the appropriate <meta> tag and have things work? What
are the differences between using straight up IE6 and the IE6 rendering engine
in IE8?

~~~
cdjk
Ha! It's a nice thought, but the various compatibility modes are _not_
actually identical to the real versions of the browsers. Close, yes, but there
are bugs/features that only show up in the real versions.

~~~
dave5104
Ah, well that sucks. :P

------
crag
I know a guy who makes a very nice living writing COBOL - support mainframes
still in use. Mostly by the banks.

You can also make a nice living writing xBase (dBase/FoxPro/Clipper) code.
Millions of lines of xbase still happily running along.

~~~
GFischer
The best paying job offers I've ever received are for senior COBOL positions
(but I'm no senior, I just took a course and had the bad idea to list it on my
CV :P ).

------
andrewflnr
I thought "ancient computers" meant more like 1000 years old, like one of
those ancient Greek gear contraption thingies. With that in mind, the actual
contents were disappointing. :(

I guess there are still a few people using abacuses, if that counts.

~~~
antman
Too bad we forgot about analog computers for 20 centuries. I guess you mean
something like this [1], just saw it up close.

[1] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_mechanism>

~~~
andrewflnr
Yes, I believe that's what I was thinking of.

------
DigitalSea
The sad reality is that some businesses use old equipment and software because
its more reliable than some of the built-to-fail junk you buy nowadays. I've
still got a Commodore 64 complete with tape deck and more games than I can
count, I'll probably never part with it and to this day it still works better
than any console or computer I've owned since. It's outlived everything.

My partner worked for an insurance company and a lot of their infrastructure
is from the late 80's so is the software and it's always worked for them.
Their reason for not switching to modern equipment is that it is more reliable
and their business centers around data. If the software or data were to fail
them in anyway that's potentially a lot of money or worse credibility and
trust lost. I think they saw it as being cheaper to maintain the current
system and I can't blame them, a lot of banks are the same too.

~~~
jader201
_> I've still got a Commodore 64 complete with tape deck and more games than I
can count, I'll probably never part with it and to this day it still works
better than any console or computer I've owned since._

Is _built_ better, maybe. But "works better"? It would take that thing 20
minutes just to load Ghostbusters. That in no way could be considered working
better than today's computers/consoles.

~~~
derleth
> It would take that thing 20 minutes just to load Ghostbusters. That in no
> way could be considered working better than today's computers/consoles.

The solution to this is simple: Pick some arbitrary point in the past, and
declare that every feature which became common after that point is 'bloat'
that 'nobody really needs'. Obviously, a good program doesn't have bloat, and
a good system can't be expected to run well unless it is given good programs,
so all good systems run well, which means better than anything that will run
bloat.

------
mindcrime
My best example of this (currently) is at home... I have an old 1995 (or so)
era whitebox PC, with - I think - a 100mhz Pentium processor - running Red Hat
Linux 9, serving as my firewall. It's ancient and I'm scared that every time
the power goes off or something that it'll never boot up again. But it quietly
sits there running iptables and routing traffic between my cable modem and the
rest of the network.

Outside of my home, I saw an ancient DEC PDP/11 still in use at a newspaper in
North Carolina as late as 1999 when I worked there. They also had an old IBM
S/36 which only got replaced with a (then) modern AS/400 box about 1999. One
of the machines they had in there (and I'm not even sure which one it was)
used those old drum-based disk drives, with the big drum with the spinnable
handle on top, that weigh about 20 lbs each, and old a whopping 50MB of data.

~~~
Wingman4l7
Wouldn't you save on power bills _(not to mention space)_ by replacing this
with a router running custom firmware?

~~~
mindcrime
Absolutely. But it works, I've gotten used to that particular box sitting in
that particular spot for years (and it serves as a platform to stack books
anyway), and the power cost is probably negligible anyway. So, given all the
other things I could spend time on, why would I bother futzing around with
that?

And I think that's kinda the point about a lot of these kinds of stories.
Everybody _knows_ that there is a better solution, but inertia, lack of
resources, and or risk related to the new solution, keep people from doing
anything about it.

So, one day sooner or later (probably sooner) the power supply in that thing
will crap out, and I'll bite the bullet and reconfigure my network to use my
wireless router to do all that stuff. Unless... I _think_ I may have another
one of those power supplies in a box in the closet somewhere....

------
danso
Last year TIME had an article about OS/2 and how NYC was still using it
[http://techland.time.com/2012/04/02/25-years-of-ibms-
os2-the...](http://techland.time.com/2012/04/02/25-years-of-ibms-os2-the-
birth-death-and-afterlife-of-a-legendary-operating-system/)

~~~
fein
During my brief stint at a POS provider, I was in charge of an OS/2 Warp
system. This was last year, and the client using the system was a pretty major
clothing retailer. never thought I'd have to learn Rexx in 2012.

~~~
nkorth
I think my first experience with programming was a Rexx app on an old Palm OS
device back in elementary school. I made an interactive fiction game, if I
remember correctly.

------
Feenstra
They skipped over the HP3000; the workhorse of many manufacturing and banking
organizations. I work in aerospace and we have three boxes in our server room.

~~~
lloeki
I spent three days salvaging critical data and pre Fortran77 programs from a
still running HP1000/RTE in a forge, driving automatas with timing and oven
temperature settings. A PL2303+linux+screen's serial mode and subsequently
python+pyserial saved the day.

What pulled the trigger on this project was that the factory's management
noticed that the last guy knowing the machine _and_ the whole process design
was retiring. I changed jobs in the meantime and I bet the thing still runs to
this day: the planned migration will probably take years but at least enough
knowledge and data has been passed on for that project to complete.

~~~
Feenstra
We are just planning our migration away from the HP3000 platform and the
MANMAN ERP. I am eternally grateful that the Sys Manager didn't let them
customize the source and instead used the ancient reporting tools (QUIZ, QTP)
to create report driven work solutions. Otherwise the next three-years of my
life would have been a nightmare of deciphering Fortran77 programs.
Surprisingly, if you have HP3000 and MANMAN on your resume, you will get a
surprising amount of job calls.

------
mrdiran
I still use my TI-86 which I bought 13 years ago. Does that count?

Surprisingly, a new one sells for double what I paid for.

~~~
VLM
My HP-48sx is 21 years old and I still use it roughly daily at home.

I have an emulator on my phone but the tactile response of the keys is awful
and the display and keyboard are tiny compared to the "real" thing.

Its just too easy to use. Latency of the calc on my phone is very high
compared to a fraction of a second. If my desktop is up and running and logged
in and a webbrowser is running (lots of ifs) then google and wolfram alpha are
starting to eat into the 48's territory. But it still gets plenty of use.
Batteries last about a year.

I also have a 32Sii at the workbench vaguely 90s vintage.

~~~
epo
Still using a HP-16C (the computer scientist) bought in the mid 80s, the first
set of batteries lasted about 10 years.

~~~
jonsen
My first set lasted longer. Still on second set.

~~~
WalterBright
I sold mine recently on ebay. 30 year old original battery still worked! I
think it found a nice home with a collector.

------
na85
You know, I'd think this would be an embarassment rather than a source of
pride.

I certainly would take my business elsewhere if I discovered the company was
doing their accounting on a punch card machine because the 60-year-old white
guys were too afraid to learn how to use windows.

~~~
qb45
What's wrong with this machine?

With typical Windows PC would come occasional hardware failures, crashes, data
losses and viruses which all are serious trouble if you don't have somebody
knowledgeable on site to mitigate and fix them.

~~~
na85
I don't think anything is wrong with the machine, fundamentally.

But seeing it in use just screams "I fear change" to me. In what other ways
are these guys in the dark ages?

------
juiceandjuice
I have a Hickok 580-A Tube Tester that I've been having a hell of a time
trying to get calibrated correctly. Someday I'll figure it out (it doesn't
help they used factory tubes for a lot of the calibration)

I love my Tektronix 2430A. I have some of the Tek 160 modules for the modular
oscilloscope from the 50s, although I haven't really tried that. If you saw
the guts, it's a point-to-point wiring masterpiece.

------
arbuge
Go figure... befoe reading this I was proud I still had a 2005 Celeron laptop
that I still use now that I've installed Ubuntu on it...

------
dmak
I got to play with one of these at the Computer History Museum during a field
trip. We went to the back and punched our names into a card and placed all our
cards into a stack where the machine sorted our names and printed everyone's
names out. It was cool and it smelt like oil. I wouldn't ever want to program
on one of these ancient relics though.

------
njharman
I do "apt-get upgrade" as a nervous habit. Sometimes more than once per day.

I find this truly fascinating.

------
calibwam
My computer club at university runs our DNS server on a MicroVAX II machine.
If you're patient, you can use SSH to log in, and when you're in, you got the
choice betweeen vi and ed to edit files. vi of course take ages to load.

~~~
GhotiFish
How's that go? Oh right

    
    
      Eight
      Megs 
      And 
      Constantly 
      Swapping.

------
pierre_massat
Isn't that much better to know you can update your software and transition to
another system every X years ?

Knowing you can update or change your system implies nothing or no one is
really indispensable. I would much prefer something like that.

~~~
ctdonath
"Well, in our country," said Alice, still panting a little, "you'd generally
get to somewhere else — if you run very fast for a long time, as we've been
doing."

"A slow sort of country!" said the Queen. "Now, here, you see, it takes all
the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get
somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!"

\- Alice in Wonderland

------
columbo
Hrm, interesting but I was hoping for a bit more. These are mostly collectors
keeping things around for nostalgia purposes. I was hoping to hear more about
legitimate systems being run on 20/30/40 year old systems.

~~~
brudgers
What is considered more legitimate than ICBM's?

~~~
columbo
Yeah, military and space hardware feels like a given. You could always say the
Voyager is the oldest running program.

I'd be more interested to hear about computers that are in use being actively
changed, with new software coming out on them to support whatever unique need
they have.

That or highly specialized one-trick-ponies that cannot change due to their
complex nature.

The military mass producing 100,000 <insert thing> from the 70's with
computers on them, or a person maintaining their BBS doesn't really feel the
same.

~~~
vidarh
You might find it more interesting to check in on the Amiga community,
perhaps.

AmigaOS is still being commercially developed, though it 'only' dates back to
1985: <http://hyperion-entertainment.biz/>

And there's new hardware for it: <http://www.a-eon.com/> <http://acube-
systems.biz/>

The market is tiny, and mostly hobbyist focused, but there is even the
occasional commercial software release, now often targetting AROS and MorphOS
(AmigaOS inspired OS's) too. For example:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_(programming_language...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_\(programming_language\))

The Amiga community is interesting because there is a distinct split between
different factions, with some insisting on only supporting "classics" (the
M68k machines) and sometimes reimplementations (there's a series of FPGA based
projects), some only interested in the current generation PPC systems (from
AEon and ACube), as well as AROS and MorphOS camps, and those only interested
in emulation.

Of course a lot of people couldn't care less about the various splits and just
want to get on with things, but this is a community where you will find people
actively using anything from 7.16MHz A500's to high end PC's to run OS's that
are widely source compatible and that either directly runs or have some level
of integrated emulation capability for old M68k apps, and where a lot of the
community still run and/or tinker with software that was released back in 1985
(e.g. there are people still tweaking the original roms to cut more cycles off
the odd system call...).

------
fafner
The US DoD is still paying for maintenance of a Symbolics Lisp Machine.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbolics#Endgame>

------
swinglock
_If It Ain't Broke, Don't Fix It_

 _That system apparently works only 60 percent of the time._

Indeed. If it's broken 40% of the time, don't fix it, replace it.

~~~
jarek
If it consistently and predictably works only 60% of the time, it might be a
better fit than a shiny new solution that breaks when you least expect it and
'upgrades' you to something different in three years.

------
auctiontheory
I bet many of the wire-wielding programmers of the old IBM systems were women
- a higher proportion in those days than today.

~~~
ams6110
Yep, the many miles of wire inside old mainframes and scientific computers
(CDC, Cray, etc.) were all hand-soldered wire by wire, connector by connector,
mostly by women. Must have been seen as requiring similar skills as sewing or
weaving.

------
ck2
And people think I am stubborn for still using Windows XP...

------
tferraz
I see some opportunities for disruption, heh?

~~~
jarek
Yeah, I'm sure they'll love to switch to a hip new startup that's guaranteed
to be around for at least six months.

~~~
Aloha
Been waiting for this comment for forever.

