oldest software in use?

Jeremy C. Reed reed at reedmedia.net
Thu Nov 30 09:02:44 MST 2006


I was was wondering what is the oldest software in use.

What is the oldest software that you use?

I sometimes play xvier (no version) from July 1992.

And I sometimes use mm (metamail) 2.7 from Feb. 1994. But I have recent 
patches for metamail so that doesn't count for me.

I also sometimes use GNU ed 0.2 from Nov. 1994. It has a patch for the 
info file from maybe five years ago too. But now ed has been revived and a 
new release was made within past couple weeks.

Another old program I use is findutils "find" 4.1 from Nov. 1994. But I 
also have various recent patches for it.

And I use mpage 2.5 from November 1997. But I know mpage has a recent 
versions so I may update soon.

I also sometimes use xearth 1.1 from Nov. 1999 with a patch from 2002 but 
I am now using xplanet instead. And I also use psutils p17 from Jan. 2000.
And I sometimes use sgmltools-lite 3.0.3 from Jun. 2001.

I also looked at the standard tools I use (under NetBSD) but everything 
except uname appears to have been updated within last few years. So I use 
"uname" from Nov. 1998. But that is not a good example as it is not 
released by itself. (I didn't look specifically at coreutils source to 
compare with that.)

Some of my customers use BSD/OS versions from mid 1990's with newer 
updates of some services, but still lot of software from mid to early 
1990's still in use.

Some of my customers run real qmail 1.03 which had last release in June 
1998. (New patches are available and netqmail is probably becoming more 
used now.)

What is the oldest software you use?

What is the oldest software used at work?

Is there newer versions available? If so, why use old?

Jeremy C. Reed


More information about the PLUG-discuss mailing list