
Ask HN: What is the oldest computer that you still use for production? - jacquesm
Someone in a thread about Perl wrote: ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1660670 ):<p>&#62; I would not at all be surprised if some critical infrastructure that must run lest a bunch of people gets killed is written in PDP 9 assembler.<p>That piqued my curiosity, what <i>is</i> the oldest piece of gear that you've still got up and running?<p>I've checked my own stuff and it seems the oldest machine that is still in use is about 4 years old.<p>I don't care about things that you have lying around that 'might still boot' or that are kept for sentimental value, old gear that is still running production of some sort.
======
ebishop
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 job.

And yes, it is used in production, for one very special task:

I'm the author of Gargoyle Router firmware (www.gargoyle-router.com), an
alternate firmware for wireless routers. I've recently started selling some
small routers with my software installed, but loading each one individually
takes some time -- about 10 minutes each. This 10+ year old system runs a
customized version of Knoppix, which can be used to install my software onto a
large number of routers simultaneously. It means I can flash as many routers
as I want within 10 minutes, instead of having to wait for 10 minutes each.
This multiplex install system has some other components as well, but this PC
sits at the center of it.

It's far more convenient to have a separate PC (especially one with a monitor)
for this, since that way I don't have to keep disconnecting/reconnecting the
necessary ethernet cords. Also, it only draws power during the brief time it's
turned on (when I'm actually doing an install), so the fact it has an
inefficient power supply isn't really a problem. It's cheap and it works,
which is what matters.

edit: It was 2003, not 2002 I first bought the system.

~~~
ritonlajoie
Have you thought about creating your own router out of an Hawkboard or
something similar ? That's something I would be very interested in, but I'm on
something else..

------
J_McQuade
While I don't know much about old what old stuff might be run by 'proper' tech
people, I do know a DJ in Bristol who still mixes everything on an Atari ST.
He's moderately popular, too, but that could be more due to his being 'part of
the furniture' than anything else - he's been at it so long that the cover to
one of his first releases was painted by Banksy before that would have cost a
small fortune!

------
Tangurena
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 32-bit
product ended up being 5 years late.

~~~
ritonlajoie
Maybe you could write a paper about that, for the dailyWtf ? I'm sure it will
be very interesting ! Please try it :)

------
jlees
On an internship with the UK defense research agency my job involved the
conversion of some ALGOL-68 simulation code into Java. I would be very
surprised if the professor for whom I worked was not still hacking away at the
ALGOL. No idea how old the machine he used was, but it would be quite happy in
a museum...

~~~
NevilleDNZ
The UK Defence Research Agency also produced
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ten15> \- Ten15 served as an intermediate
language for various compilers, but with several unique features, some of
which have still to see the light of day in everyday systems.

UK Defence Research Agency's ALGOL 68RS (algol68toc) is available from
sourceforge, It now generates C.

The interpreter Algol68G is also available, is easier to use, and a list
snippets can be found at <http://rosettacode.org/wiki/User:NevilleDNZ>

To download Linux's Algol68 Compiler & Interpreter: *
<http://sourceforge.net/projects/algol68>

------
ajdecon
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_...

------
lotharbot
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.

~~~
dunstad
Sounds like somebody's startup idea. Any idea what the software he needs is?

------
m0nastic
Recently I was onsite with a client doing a pet test when I came across a
production server running NT 4.

It was a PBX, supplied by a vendor, and therefore unable to be administered or
upgraded by the client without voiding the warranty. Amusingly, the company I
was at had only existed for about two years; which means that at least
sometime in the past two years, there is a company selling a PBX appliance
that runs on NT 4 (I don't even know how they can get a license for it).

Off topic; port scanning it was like trying to remove yourself from a landmine
that you stepped on. It required action-movie dexterity.

------
tptacek
Telecoms people have old SPARC Sun hardware running in production.

Go to manufacturing and you'll find Windows 3.1.

On the other hand, we can't even seem to keep a Macbook for more than a year
or so.

------
mattlanger
I 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...](http://www.enterpriseinnovation.net/content/how-should-
government-it-professionals-manage-legacy-code)

This showed up here a while back and is also an interesting read:
[http://fosspatents.blogspot.com/2010/08/western-
civilization...](http://fosspatents.blogspot.com/2010/08/western-civilization-
runs-on-mainframe.html)

Sometimes in all my eagerness to keep up and constantly re-educate myself on a
daily basis I forget that there are still a lot of very, _very_ old systems
out there.

~~~
kbob
That's slightly less impressive when you remember that it takes about 1,000
lines of Cobol to write Hello, World.

~~~
jpr
According to Wikipedia, only 5 lines:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobol#Hello.2C_world>

------
cperciva
The 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.

~~~
jacquesm
Embedded systems count. In that case my oldest is now 1993, from a relatively
late Mini with an ECU in it. The ECU is just about the only part on that car
that doesn't rust.

------
csomar
The other day, I visited a lawyer, he was still using the first computer he
ever bought. I think it's MS-Dos 5 or 4. His application runs when MS-Dos open
and he still using it. He have a modern notebook, though. But only for
browsing the net.

------
bsagert
My 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.

------
waivej
My primary desktop is 7-8 years old...? (p4 2g ram, win2003 server) It feels
the same speed as my 1 year old Macbook. I mostly use it for programming,
Photoshop, and video editing.

Edit: It's been running the whole time except for moves and maintenance.

------
tomjen3
I posted that comment, but I don't really expect any startup to have that old
tech (except as a curiosity).

I was thinking more of big enterprise or same bank or a transportation company
that has been around for so long that a lot of their tech was made by people
who not only isn't there anymore but nobody currently there worked with.

Take the example from wired of a how many companies still use punch cards in
1999 (<http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/7.03/punchcards.html>) or the
related question I posted to stack overflow
([http://stackoverflow.com/questions/750606/what-
technologies-...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/750606/what-technologies-
are-you-using-even-though-they-are-embarassingly-out-of-date)) some time ago.
There are some very interesting responses to that, though there is also a lot
of fluff.

~~~
jacquesm
Up to about a year ago I still had a DNS server running that was first built
in '98 or so, and plenty of people here work for 'the man' and must have all
kinds of interesting legacy tech they still have to use.

Also, the people that use embedded systems might have an oldie kicking around
doing something useful.

------
ErrantX
The oldest machine we have PIII that is used from time to time for floppy disk
and tape drive acquisitions (like, once a month maybe)

The oldest machine in constant use is a Pentium 4 3.2GHz from '04 which is
making rainbow tables in our cluster (it is one of my old machines which was
sat on a shelf, every little helps)

------
j-g-faustus
The oldest I know of is with a relative of mine. He runs an accounting
company, and they are using a 15 year old IBM minicomputer (a small mainframe
- <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minicomputer> ) for the accounting.

I asked him once why he didn't switch to PCs, he couldn't see any reason to do
so - the minicomputer was rock solid, still running strong and had the
software he needed.

I imagine the oldest machines still in production would be with companies that
regard computers the way a factory would regard expensive machinery -
switching costs are high, and there is no sense in switching when the old one
still works.

And I guess they would be mainframe class computers rather than PCs.

------
aw3c2
Not hardware, but a mid 40s lady I help with PC things happily uses some 20+
year old DOS software for managing her small business. She even programmed
some custom templates and reports. She struggles with the concept of windows
and does not like using the mouse.

------
jsz0
We retired our last OS/2 & NT 3.51 server this year but still have a few NT4
machines. These servers are part of integrated solutions that were EOL-ed long
ago but were still functional enough to stay in production.

------
runjake
TRS-80 Model 100 laptop (with an RS-232 connection) for our security panel.

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.

~~~
jacquesm
The model 100 was in a class of its own. Crazy battery life, a day of
continuous use on a bunch of penlights.

Oh, and here is your trophy ;) :

    
    
        \  oldest /
         \   hw  /
          \     /
           \   /
           -----
            / \
    

Do check out the algol 68 reference in this thread though!

------
zppx
In my company we have three Pentium 2 boxes working as routers and one working
as a internal gateway (with full connectivity redundancy), we use OpenBSD, pf
and the carp interface.

~~~
protomyth
I have a very early Via motherboard with flash drive running OpenBSD as a
firewall for the business office on the internal network. I probably need to
replace it eventually, but it works fine / still can be updated.

------
coryrc
Commodore 64

So 25-30 years old?

My last employer used it plus some custom hardware for checking wire harness
assemblies.

------
sgt
Sun Blade 2000

I'm actually planning to put an SSD in it, but my co-workers say it's a waste
of money. That may be true, but it'll be the coolest Blade 2000 out there.

~~~
Zev
On a tangentially related note, a friend of mine is planning on putting an SSD
into his PowerBook G4. Of course, those plans may be on hold as he claims to
not use his computer much anymore, after getting an iPad.

~~~
Ras_
Cheaper alternative to SSD: Compact Flash card with an adapter. I'm currently
working on installing one into my iBook G4.

~~~
Zev
There's an idea! The last time I personally looked at CF cards was a few years
ago. Back then, the theoretical max speed was "only" 66MB/s, which an SSD can
easily top. However, it looks like the new theoretical max is 133MB/s _, which
is faster than many SSDs, especially after use without TRIM.

_ says the wikipedia page for CompactFlash

------
dandelany
The company I work for has two fax servers for the handful of people in the
world who still think it's amazing that you can send paper through the
telephone. They're Gateway 2000s. Don't know the exact model, but they still
have this logo on them:

[http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/0/00/Gateway_2000_L...](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/0/00/Gateway_2000_Logo.svg)

------
bconway
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).

------
sprout
There are all sorts of proprietary systems running on old machines with
Windows 3.11 at the university I used to work at, from the scoreboard in the
football stadium to extremely expensive scanning electron microscopes.

Also, there's a 7-year-old Solaris machine which hosts the entire
administrative database, with no fallback.

------
qwdseyjh
We have the same VME crate running the telescope drive motors that was put in
when the place was built in the early 80s.

There are a lot of 1960s minicomputers running factories and power stations
out there. Do you want to close down a major power plant to install a PC based
replacement and hope that it works first time?

~~~
jacquesm
> Do you want to close down a major power plant to install a PC based
> replacement and hope that it works first time?

This will probably sound weird but I actually feel better with that 1960's
stuff in there even if the PC based replacement would work the first time.

If only because I think that it wouldn't last. PCs are built using cheap
components, even the industrial ones. It's very hard to even find a power
supply that will last more than a few years. And anything with a 'regular' fan
on it is immediately suspect.

------
manumental
i still use a SGI Octane2 for web related coding and some video work. it runs
KDE3 ontop of IRIX, it also has gimp, inkscape, Illustrator 5.5 and Photoshop
3, Firefox 2 and runs jEdit (java). Pretty much all i need. It's still
reasonably snappy. Farewell IRIX.

------
sgoraya
A Dell computer running Win 2K server w/ a Pentium 400MHz & 512MB RAM. Its an
old server but has not crashed in years (I've rebooted for maintenance here
and there, but thats it).

I think I've had it since since 2001 or 2002.

------
ido
At my first job some extremely expensive piece of spectrometry equipment was
controlled by a Compaq Deskpro 386 (c. 1986).

I left at the beginning of 2005 and it wouldn't surprise me if the Deskpro is
still there.

~~~
jacquesm
That does not surprise me one bit, those old dekspros were nearly
indestructible. I've seen one be pulled off a table in a warehouse by someone
tripping over a cord, the case dented the concrete floor but the compaq never
blinked. Amazing hardware. I think that's the line that really cemented the
compaq = solid in people's heads. They also weighed quite a bit.

~~~
blasdel
My parents started a PC software ISV in the early 80s, and they bought one of
the first thousand Compaq Portables in 1983 (the very first PC clones!), that
they would take with them to trade shows. The keyboard flipped up to form a
lid that covered the screen and floppy drives, but it had a design flaw in
that it was more of a boot than a lid — the screen was on the bottom, and
eventually the CRT was broken by a Airport porter. The next portable my dad
bought was the first Thinkpad with a color screen. It had a PS/2 architecture
and he ran OS/2 on it much of the time.

Both computers were solid as hell.

He definitely had a habit of buying insanely expensive computers and then
using them _forever_. He had an old Dell 386 that eventually got a huge SCSI
enclosure that he used as his primary machine for close to ten years (my mom
had a matching one that lasted even longer). When he got a 1-meter tall dual
Pentium Pro tower from Micron, he just set it up at the the other end of his
12ft desk and kept using both. He kept using that thing for another 5 years
until he got a dual P4 Xeon with Rambus memory, which then lasted another 8
years (he only replaced it last year!).

------
mikemol
For PC hardware, in-house there's a 1.8GHz Athlon running Asterisk. Out in the
field, I think our lowest end is a P4 2.2GHz.

Non-PC hardware? I don't know; embedded devices all kinda blur together for
me.

------
wglb
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.

~~~
wglb
Oh, i almost forgot the two HP200LX (dos) hand-helds that i have. One of them
even has a lisp and a Turbo C compiler on it.

------
jeffiel
An EC2 instance that's been running for 48 days :)

------
mahmud
At 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)

~~~
WalterGR
What's Allegro Serve serving?

~~~
mahmud
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.

------
Confusion
Up until the beginning of this year, one of my former clients used a PIII
1133MHz with 512MB of memory to serve two Java applications with, at peak
days, ~20K daily hits and ~2K sales with a turnover of ~100K euro. The
machines could easily handle twenty times that volume. There was a machine
with similar specs available for failover.

------
efutch
We have an IBM RS/6000 43P circa 1996 still running, doing production email
services. No hardwaree problems at all!

------
davidw
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)

~~~
jlees
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.

~~~
ritonlajoie
I second that.. I'm trying to start my business with an old Dell bi-xeon
server, one P3 733MHz and 3 other older computers. As far as they work fine, I
use them to run web crawling, solr and hadoop.

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.

~~~
ido
Old computers are not exactly 'free', as they use a lot more watt per flop
than new computers.

------
20after4
At 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.

------
zandorg
A Windows 98 PC for sample transfer to an old Akai S950 (software doesn't work
in Windows XP), and the same machine to run a HardSID ISA card (ISA is a pre-
PCI PC device bus).

------
leif
parts of my desktop are around 6 or 7 years old, but I gave it a refurbish
about 4 years back

not currently using for production because after staying up all night updating
and deleting old backups, I forgot to bring it where I was going :(

------
staunch
NES?

------
WalterBright
I do my FreeBSD testing on a 10 year old box.

