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This might be a bit of a niche thread, but what's the oldest bit of software you still use?

I've just realised that the version of Paint Shop Pro which lives in my Dropbox is from 1998 (4.15) and is older than some of my co-workers...

I’ve….honestly no idea!

I’m not sure if it counts, as I don’t know if there was any tweaking, but if folk have a NES or Master System mini, might they be playing with decades old software?

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
I’m not sure if it counts, as I don’t know if there was any tweaking, but if folk have a NES or Master System mini, might they be playing with decades old software?

It can count! I've got a temperamental PS2 and a mostly happy XBOX, but my Dreamcast finally died last year.

Still enjoy playing Hero's Quest / Quest For Glory 1 on occasion - that was originally 1989 I think

Was using MS Visio 2003 and Acrobat X up until the beginning of this year. Updated to the current releases.

We still have a functioning NES, SuperNES, and Genesis.

However, the abacus on my son’s desk has them all beat.

Off the top of my head I would guess WinAmp.

I still play the original Descent, which I believe released in 1994 originally. Admittedly that may not count as I use the DXX Rebirth mod for it which makes the graphics look a lot better on a modern computer.

Winamp
Photoshop cs2 its superfast in 2022
modernt software tend to become SUBSCRIPTION (which is stupid)

I guess it depends on the definition of oldest, not sure if still receives updates and support counts but for me it would be CutePDF writer.

I started using it in the 2000s as a very simple plugin to print word documents to PDF (before that was a built in function) and still use it today. They also have a pro version for $50 which lets you edit PDFs which is a bargain compared to the monthly subscription model Adobe switched to.

I don't think I use anything terribly old on my home computer. Occasionally I'll play an old video game from the 90's, early 90's probably being the oldest.

At work we have a computer that's still running windows XP because it has software that doesn't work in newer versions of windows, and to get a newer version of that software is too expensive.

 oni wrote:
Was using MS Visio 2003 and Acrobat X up until the beginning of this year.

I stuck with an old version of Visio (might have been 2003) for far too long.

 BobtheInquisitor wrote:
However, the abacus on my son’s desk has them all beat.

Our Finance Director has a mechanical calculator thing.

 Ahtman wrote:
Off the top of my head I would guess WinAmp.

That really whips the llama's ass.

AllSeeingSkink wrote:
At work we have a computer that's still running windows XP because it has software that doesn't work in newer versions of windows

Same with one of our sites - it's the computer the phone system is connected to, and no-one knows what to do with it.

Still got a zx spectrum that I break out once in a blue moon.

beast_gts wrote:

AllSeeingSkink wrote:
At work we have a computer that's still running windows XP because it has software that doesn't work in newer versions of windows

Same with one of our sites - it's the computer the phone system is connected to, and no-one knows what to do with it.

Argh! I would really recommend someone grasps the nettle there and takes on updating it. Otherwise you're going to need to do it in an emergency when the hardware fails and it turns out nothing is backed up...

 Inquisitor Gideon wrote:
Still got a zx spectrum that I break out once in a blue moon.

I remember my dad had the DIY kit version of that, sold under the Sinclair name. It was mounted on plywood. He probably still has it buried away somewhere.

Anyway, my oldest bit of software would be Akalabeth, part of the Ultima collection on GoG. But I wouldn't really count that as I haven't ever played it. For games I've played, I think The Bard's Tale is the oldest at 1985? Legacy of the Ancients is the very first game I ever bought with my own money as a kid (bought at the original brick and mortar store of what would become CompUSA). I no longer have the original floppies, but I do own GoG copies of them and have played them.

Crispy78 wrote:

beast_gts wrote:

AllSeeingSkink wrote:
At work we have a computer that's still running windows XP because it has software that doesn't work in newer versions of windows

Same with one of our sites - it's the computer the phone system is connected to, and no-one knows what to do with it.

Argh! I would really recommend someone grasps the nettle there and takes on updating it. Otherwise you're going to need to do it in an emergency when the hardware fails and it turns out nothing is backed up...

In our case, to update the old computer would cost enough that no one is willing to back it and say "yeah, this is worthwhile". We just use it for some instrumentation and while we do use that instrumentation for some projects, the projects that use it aren't the ones that bring in a lot of money and we aren't doing them constantly.

If that computer dies, we'll likely just find another old computer we can install XP on, or finally bite the bullet and upgrade it alongside the software and/or instrumentation. Until then, there's not a strong motivation to drop the necessary cash on the upgrade.

I'll guessing Quake 3, it was the FPS game of my gaming clique in the way back

We tried the update which was good, but not quite "right"

Then the staying in times happened and having watched all of Netflix someone suggested with a retro blast of Q3, oddly
pecking order was mostly unchanged, I'm assuming we all got slow and old at the same rate

Come and work in the NHS or British local government! My clients have so much 20, 30, 40 year old software.

The typical system I replace is 10-20 years old. It's out of support, and anybody who fully understood it on either the supplier or customer side left a decade ago. There's a cloud of supporting software glommed onto it to make it work with more modern hardware

Often, it was modified from a data schema from an older system, often through several generations, so internal codes have to go through several layers of translation to match up with modern statutory coding. Working processes may be based on who had which office in 1977.

I was replacing systems on flat-file databases from the late 70s/early 80s until about 5 years ago. Systems that ran entire groups of hospitals...

 Momotaro wrote:
Come and work in the NHS or British local government! My clients have so much 20, 30, 40 year old software.

The typical system I replace is 10-20 years old. It's out of support, and anybody who fully understood it on either the supplier or customer side left a decade ago. There's a cloud of supporting software glommed onto it to make it work with more modern hardware

Often, it was modified from a data schema from an older system, often through several generations, so internal codes have to go through several layers of translation to match up with modern statutory coding. Working processes may be based on who had which office in 1977.

I was replacing systems on flat-file databases from the late 70s/early 80s until about 5 years ago. Systems that ran entire groups of hospitals...

Reminds me of the school I used to do IT for a lifetime ago. I’d also been a student there, and some of the PC’s I was fixing circa 2001 had been there since before 1991.

The network itself was more based on faith, hope and superglue than actual common sense. That was of course a consequence of computing growing so rapidly, and schools only having a limited budget.

Shortly before I left, one of the scrotes tried an arson attack which was partially successful (if they’d perhaps pushed the van into the art rooms, with the science labs above then set light to it it probably would’ve taken the whole thing out) and gutted the Server room, and as a result most of the Important Cabling. By the time I was moving on, everything had been replaced, and it was much, much neater and more logically laid out.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Reminds me of the school I used to do IT for a lifetime ago. I’d also been a student there, and some of the PC’s I was fixing circa 2001 had been there since before 1991.

Now, do you mean PCs, or Beebs & Acorns?


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Momotaro wrote:
Come and work in the NHS or British local government! My clients have so much 20, 30, 40 year old software.

Currently doing that with a Legal client - the 'database' is from the 90s, with a load of crud grafted on...

back when i was working for a veterinary laboratory (10years ago -- when did that happen!?!?) we were using lab software written in a french version of msdos from the mid 80's.
It was a pain to learn to add tests and comments to as it was all command line with french acronyms and single letter codes.

was still much better than the made to measure suite they were using when I left!

beast_gts wrote:

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Reminds me of the school I used to do IT for a lifetime ago. I’d also been a student there, and some of the PC’s I was fixing circa 2001 had been there since before 1991.

Now, do you mean PCs, or Beebs & Acorns?


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Momotaro wrote:
Come and work in the NHS or British local government! My clients have so much 20, 30, 40 year old software.

Currently doing that with a Legal client - the 'database' is from the 90s, with a load of crud grafted on...

Definitely PCs.

Not likely to do public sector now - they can't afford me! Last time I looked, doing the same job in the NHS would have involved about a 35-40% pay cut.

Feeling a lot better about our current environment though; we just got rid of our last legacy Windows 7 machines, and are now trying to stamp out anything older than Windows 10 20H2...

 Ahtman wrote:
Off the top of my head I would guess WinAmp.

Also winamp(2013) here.

Until a few years back I was still using VB6 (1998) from time to time. Last thing I wrote on it was a 6502 machine language to hex/decimal converter to program something for the C64...

C000: A9 00 20 00 10 A9 7F 8D 0D DC AD 0D DC 78 A9 01 8D 1A D0 A9 01 8D 12 D0 AD 11 D0 29 7F 8D 12 D0 A9 2C 8D 14 03 A9 C0 8D 15 03 58 60 EE 19 D0 20 03 10 4C 31 EA
53 bytes of misery :p

MS Win. 7 Notepad text editor. Use it for for everything work related. From document rough drafts to to-lists, e-mail composition, reports, etc. Reason is, it is the ASCI Lingua Franci that can be pasted to any doc app, without having to bother with indents, tab sets, or any other annoying document presets. Then I simply paste the text to what ever text or doc app I wish to for editing. For to-do lists, I just press F5 and start typing.

MS Paint is another go-to app I use to this day because it is simple yet versatile and powerful. Another lingua franci for graphics editing.

@Crispy78 I went contract, they still need lots of us even in the public sector.

More because I got sick of working for people rather than with them, so the lifestyle suits me. You do you though.

Crispy78 wrote:
Feeling a lot better about our current environment though; we just got rid of our last legacy Windows 7 machines, and are now trying to stamp out anything older than Windows 10 20H2...

As long as you help get people back up and running again. Our IT department decided to wander through one of our offices and upgrade the OS on a few older machines (not even that old, maybe 5 or 6 years), only notifying one of the new guys who didn't really know what that would mean... the next week we come in and half our instrumentation doesn't work, the IT guys just tell us "oh, that's too bad, we don't know anything about that instrumentation so good luck with that". That cost us a decent chunk of downtime, lost wages, and destroyed several days worth of work because the upgrade didn't import a lot of calibration files which wasn't initially noticed so some folk continued using instrumentation with wrong calibrations so that work was essentially lost and had to be repeated.

We now live in fear of the IT department There was a computer that IT said they wanted to upgrade so we just unplugged it from the network instead, lol.

Oh yeah, absolutely. One of the things I'm involved with at the moment is a SAP reporting tool that plugs in to Excel. Unfortunately it's now basically a legacy product that only works in 32 bit Office and we as a company have moved to 64 bit - so we currently have users who rely on this tool who are trapped on old machines with old builds. I've been initiating discussions with the users and with IT at a global level to try to help them migrate to the newer tool, which is 64 bit compatible but not a direct like-for-like replacement, to try to make sure they get all the support from us that they need while allowing us to replace their knackered old laptops... Fun stuff!

Going to go with the games for my ps2.

The PS2 (older big-body version, not the slimline one) had the network adaptor add-on installed (and the HDD that also connected to it).
Original switchmode power supply. Replaced fan, replaced dvd unit but otherwise works fine. Still talks to the old 5.1 system, too.

 Ahtman wrote:
Off the top of my head I would guess WinAmp.

That really whips the llama's ass.

Yup!

Winamp for me too.


Quake1, Doom 1 and 2. I don't know how much those count though, they may be updated things via steam. Uh, I still have my Quake I and II cds tho.