Ask HN: What's the oldest software you still use today? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What's the oldest software you still use today?

19 pointsonuralp49 comments

Inspired by the thread on ever-lasting software.

Maybe tar? First version is from 1979.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tar_(computing)

Although mine was written in 2010.

  % tar --version
  bsdtar 2.8.3 - libarchive 2.8.3

Edit: Actually it's probably telnet which I use to get into lab equipment. First version is from 1973. The version I run was written in 1993.

Oldest as in oldest origin or oldest release?

Irfanview comes to mind as the default image viewer for Windows

Deoxyribonucleic acid

It's a shame the source has been lost so everybody has to modify the object code in situ. An utter revision control disaster!

Or, potentially, the best version control system ever? Automatically forgetting dead code is a pretty sweet feature :P

Sadly there's tons of dead code just lying around in the chromosomes just waiting to be activated.

We've already started the reversing effort:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QHIocNOHd7A

I'm guessing that some of the included BSD tools on my Mac are pretty old, because they're so simple. https://gist.github.com/pete/665971

Does using a recent version of something that's been updated for a while count? Adobe Illustrator's first release was March 1987, making it 32 years old this month; I use it pretty much daily. I'm currently using last year's version.

If not then I think it's Neko. http://splook.com/Software/Neko.html

Lately my Mac has been warning me that Neko will stop working soon once Apple drops support for 32-bit apps and that will be a sad day indeed.

VLC for sure.

>The VideoLan software originated as an academic project in 1996

Warning: nerd at work. The question may be ambiguous. To highlight: compare "what's the oldest software you still use today" to "what's the oldest software you use today". The first one refers to software you have been using over a longish(?) period and the second to software that may be old that you are using even though you may have only begun using it. I hope my pedantry (pedanticism?) isn't too inane...

I hope my pedantry (pedanticism?) isn't too inane...

Or, you surreptitiously hope it's much too inane, much as people do with puns. What should we call those who secretly love pedantry? "Pedantophiles?" Oh what a difference one syllable makes!

I think that would be someone who secretly loves pedants, which isn't quite the same thing as secretly loving pedantry.

Am I doing this right?

I don't know. I got downvoted, so apparently I'm doing it right!

Actually, I like your sense of humour.

Command line: basic Unix utilities (cd, anyone?)

GUI, used regularly: BBEdit, 1992

GUI, used infrequently: MS Word, 1983

GUI, not updated in forever: abandonware games played in DosBox

Winamp 5.6, on all my Windows PCs. It's my most missed software on my Mac. I'd even install it in my car if I could...

Why 5.6, specifically? What was it about that version?

That's the last official release, 5.7 & 5.8 are leaked betas.

Well, that makes perfect sense.

Because it really whips the llama's ass!

Aimp is a good windows piece of software too

I have been using the same web browser, in terms of codebase, ideology and heritage, for over a quarter century now.

NCSA Mosaic -> Netscape 2, 3, 4/4.78, 6 -> Firebird -> Firefox -> Waterfox.

I have run other web browsers such as Opera and Vivaldi, but my main browser has always been and will always be a Mozilla product.

Assuming we count recent versions of old-school software mine are:

foobar2000 vim (I was still being breastfed when Bram started)

Probably vim.

I use vi on occasion when I'm in a new BSD box and haven't installed vim yet, so there's that.

I still use xv by John Bradley regularly.. the most recent version 3.10a was released on 29/12/1994 !

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xv_(software)

GNU grep. If you cheat and count years since the original grep it's pretty old.

Not sure if that's cheating - most of the suggestions on this page go from the original version of something. A kind of 'Ship of Theseus' problem - there's no natural or obvious definition of 'what counts as still the same thing' (except 'all parts exactly the same', I guess).

Wikipedia says grep is from 1974.

Cat, chmod, chown, comp, cp, date, df, du, ed, find, ln, ls, mailx, mkdir, mv, nm, od, pr, rm, rmdir, sort, strip, tty, unlink, wc, who, and write are from Version 1 Unix - Nov 1971!

The page for ed says: "It was one of the first parts of the Unix operating system that was developed, in August 1969."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Unix_commands

My father, a chemistry professor, still uses PegasusMail which has been around since approx the year 1990. He is also good at handling his mail through `pine` program over a terminal.

On the gaming side: Star Control 2: The Ur-Quan Masters. I'll still play Battlezone once in awhile, which goes back to 1980.

Oldest still supported? Probably gotta be GCC.

Oldest unsupported? I have some VB6 tools I use to make tilesets for Sega Genesis homebrews.

winamp 2.7 from 2001 for my mp3s. Still works fine on windows 10

Nah, need 5 for Unicode support. :) using the classic skin it's pretty much the same.

ed, emacs.

I was going to say emacs too.

GNU emacs goes back to 1985, although I used TECO emacs before that.

But ed is older, although what is in use today is probably GNU ed, which was written after GNU emacs.

Do you actually use Ed, or the series of other programs that are based on it, like vi(m) and sed?

I occasionally try to use ed as a distraction free editor.

Emacs and GHC

ls for showing files.

Xixit!

If only for the music tracks.

GNU coreutils.

SAP

WordPress?

I still use Reaktor by Native Instruments. It's been on the market since like '96 or something and it's ugly and clumsy as hell but it still sounds way better than anything else...

PaintShop Pro 7, about 18 years old.

Paint Shop Pro 5 and 9 here

PSP 5 here. Build date of March 30, 1998.

Cool Edit Pro (Adobe Audition has never been nearly as good)

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