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.<p>Here's a sample of a great mod: <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dZWgXiVJbpI" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dZWgXiVJbpI</a> - albeit from a lame demo. There are thousands more available at aminet.net.<p>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.
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.<p>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.
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]<p>[1] <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harwell_computer" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harwell_computer</a><p>[2] <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVgc8ksstyg" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVgc8ksstyg</a> (the video doesn't really do it justice)
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.
I didn't see this anywhere in the comments, so here it is.<p>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.<p>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?<p>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.
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).
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.
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
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.<p>The two guys in the room (I'm guessing that room is <i>always</i> manned, even during a refit) immediately understood our concern. "No no," they said, "that's not the missile computer. <i>That's</i> 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.<p>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.
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.
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.<p>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.<p>(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.)
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).
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.
Apparently Polish National Rail(PKP) still uses a 40 year old Odra computer for train logging at one of their stations:
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odra_(computer)" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odra_(computer)</a><p>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.
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.
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.
I know a guy who makes a very nice living writing COBOL - support mainframes still in use. Mostly by the banks.<p>You can also make a nice living writing xBase (dBase/FoxPro/Clipper) code. Millions of lines of xbase still happily running along.
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. :(<p>I guess there are still a few people using abacuses, if that counts.
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.<p>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.
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.<p>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.
Last year TIME had an article about OS/2 and how NYC was still using it <a href="http://techland.time.com/2012/04/02/25-years-of-ibms-os2-the-birth-death-and-afterlife-of-a-legendary-operating-system/" rel="nofollow">http://techland.time.com/2012/04/02/25-years-of-ibms-os2-the...</a>
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.
You know, I'd think this would be an embarassment rather than a source of pride.<p>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.
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)<p>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.
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.
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.
Isn't that much better to know you can update your software and transition to another system every X years ?<p>Knowing you can update or change your system implies nothing or no one is really indispensable. I would much prefer something like that.
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.
The US DoD is still paying for maintenance of a Symbolics Lisp Machine. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbolics#Endgame" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbolics#Endgame</a>
<i>If It Ain't Broke, Don't Fix It</i><p><i>That system apparently works only 60 percent of the time.</i><p>Indeed. If it's broken 40% of the time, don't fix it, replace it.