What's the oldest computer you've seen in use today?

[TPA5]

This didn't used to be the case. It was typical for Mac owners to hang on to their machines over twice as long as PC owners, and often used as a reason why the initial higher price of a Mac was over time less expensive than a PC. I knew many Mac owners who held onto their machines for at least 5 years, often even longer. I'm not seeing nearly as much of that these days...

 

I used my iMac for just over 5 years before the main-board quit, and if that hadn't happened I had planned to use it longer. But I think the general culture is one of "upgrade whenever the commercials tell you to".

 

(I know I'm quoting a very old post but I just thought I'd throw that out there)

 

Back on topic, there's an observatory about 2 hours from where I live that uses an Apple II to run their telescope. I haven't personally seen it, but a friend of mine has been there.

Edited August 19, 2014 by TPA5

[bkrownd]

Back on topic, there's an observatory about 2 hours from where I live that uses an Apple II to run their telescope. I haven't personally seen it, but a friend of mine has been there.

 

Observatories often run on legacy computers. The place I worked at in the 1990's ran on a hand wire-wrapped ModComp from the late 1970's, with the blinkenlights and the rocker switches on the front of the chassis. The place I am now is all PowerPC chips from the early 1990's. An observatory's lifetime is 20-30 years, so once you've written your software early on in the project you never want to lose time trying to change it.

[Tempest]

 

Observatories often run on legacy computers. The place I worked at in the 1990's ran on a hand wire-wrapped ModComp from the late 1970's, with the blinkenlights and the rocker switches on the front of the chassis. The place I am now is all PowerPC chips from the early 1990's. An observatory's lifetime is 20-30 years, so once you've written your software early on in the project you never want to lose time trying to change it.

Our local observatory was using an Apple IIe to run their planetarium show as late as the early 2000's (last time I was there). I wouldn't be surprised if it was STILL in use.

[Gamemoose]

I can't recall the number of years ago I went (10 years? More?) but some of the trivia kiosks at the Museum of Science and Industry still used TI 99-4A's in them. I think they were on an upper floor across from the heart you could walk through.

 

A client of mine is still using Power Mac G5's for their newspaper and another client had a no-name 486 running Windows 3.1 for customer database upkeep and label printing along with two electronic typewriters that were capable of printing from a computer! This was probably two years ago. That old dinosaur did die out.

[Tempest]

I can't recall the number of years ago I went (10 years? More?) but some of the trivia kiosks at the Museum of Science and Industry still used TI 99-4A's in them. I think they were on an upper floor across from the heart you could walk through.

Are they loading them from tape or did they have some kind of special cartridge made? I can't believe they'd be using disks due the need of the PEB or a few sidecars.

[Gamemoose]

Are they loading them from tape or did they have some kind of special cartridge made? I can't believe they'd be using disks due the need of the PEB or a few sidecars.

I'm guessing cartridge. I couldn't see the whole computer as there was a space between a panel and the kiosk shell itself that I could look down and see the top of a tannish/white console with the "Texas Instruments" wording.

[Tempest]

Interesting. I wonder what cart it was running? It needs to be dumped.

 

To the museum!

[+FujiSkunk]

 

This didn't used to be the case. It was typical for Mac owners to hang on to their machines over twice as long as PC owners, and often used as a reason why the initial higher price of a Mac was over time less expensive than a PC. I knew many Mac owners who held onto their machines for at least 5 years, often even longer. I'm not seeing nearly as much of that these days...

I used my iMac for just over 5 years before the main-board quit, and if that hadn't happened I had planned to use it longer. But I think the general culture is one of "upgrade whenever the commercials tell you to".

 

Old quotes can still be good quotes.

 

In 1997 I bought a Power Macintosh 7300, and half-jokingly told everyone that would be my computer for the next 10 years. It just about was. It helped that the 7300 was one of the most expandable Macintoshes ever released. By the time I finally gave it up, I had doubled its video RAM (2MB to a whopping 4MB), greatly expanded the regular memory, swapped out the 200MHz 604 CPU with a 400MHz G3, added USB and IDE cards, put in a much larger IDE hard drive, and dual-booted Mac OS 9 and Gentoo Linux. Other computers came and went during that time, but the 7300 remained my go-to system for general computing. It served me well, and even though it was a decrepit old dinosaur when I finally got rid of it, I was sad to see it go.

 

I think the oldest computer I've seen in service lately is my own Windows 2000 system. When I decided to dedicate a system to audio/video capture projects, my roommate and I put together a Win2K box with a bleeding-edge Radeon All-in-Wonder, one of the first cards to offer both 3D acceleration and video capture on a single video card. Thirteen or so years later, I'm still using that OS and I'm still using that video card. It's all on a faster motherboard and CPU now, but even those are P4-based and fairly old in their own right. I use the box pretty much only for video capture, but it still gets the job done.

[barrym95838]

I am a licensed California automotive smog technician, and I use Old Faithful (described below) six days a week, 8 hours a day to perform emissions testing and issue certificates of compliance for cars and trucks from model years 1976 to 1999. Just recently, in the last few months, a new system has been approved to inspect and certify model years 2000 and newer, but there is no mandatory replacement planned for the old machine for the foreseeable future.

 

Generation 1 ESP BAR-97 emissions inspection system with 5-gas analyzer and dynamometer:

266 MHz Celeron

OS/2

14" CRT in VGA mode all the time (except for crashes and boots).

32 MB RAM

800 MB Hard Drive

28.8K Dial-up modem

When I tell people about it, the dial-up modem usually gets the biggest laugh.

Mike.

Edited October 8, 2014 by barrym95838

[Tempest]

At work we still use a few servers that use Pentium III processors and are running Windows 2000. We're finally decommissioning them though. There are still some old 486 IBM PS/2 machines running DOS and some running OS 2 WARP in the back, but I think those have all been decommed.

[Hatta]

Last week I used a spectrophotometer from 1990. It had one of those terrible low contrast LCD screens, an RS232 port, and the manual had BASIC code for controlling it from an NEC 98 series. No computer with it, but the spec itself works perfectly after all these years.

[BigO]

Compaq Proliant 850R (Pentium Pro) running a piece of diagnostic equipment (which used light stimulus and a photomultipler tube somehow to detect whether ingredients had been irradiated) that required an ISA slot (and Windows 2000) for a digital I/O card. The manufacturer of the equipment declined to support any other hardware configuration when we last inquired.

 

I was happy to let the company keep my "temporary loan" 850R when I left that job a couple of years ago. As far as I know, it's in the room sounding like a jet engine still today. Not a quiet machine.

Edited October 8, 2014 by BigO

[MarkO]

 

I am a licensed California automotive smog technician, and I use Old Faithful (described below) six days a week, 8 hours a day to perform emissions testing and issue certificates of compliance for cars and trucks from model years 1976 to 1999. Just recently, in the last few months, a new system has been approved to inspect and certify model years 2000 and newer, but there is no mandatory replacement planned for the old machine for the foreseeable future.

 

Generation 1 ESP BAR-97 emissions inspection system with 5-gas analyzer and dynamometer:

266 MHz Celeron

OS/2

14" CRT in VGA mode all the time (except for crashes and boots).

32 MB RAM

800 MB Hard Drive

28.8K Dial-up modem

When I tell people about it, the dial-up modem usually gets the biggest laugh.

Mike.

 

 

 

Which version of OS/2???

 

MarkO

[Hyperboy]

[barrym95838]

 

 

Which version of OS/2???

 

MarkO

 

I believe that the splash screen says OS/2 Warp, but it only gets re-booted every couple of weeks, when it crashes. The rest of the time it is either being used, sitting on the main menu or sitting in standby. The CRT is deeply burned to the outline of the main menu, but it still works okay. The next time it crashes, I'll try to get some screen snapshots of the reboot from my co-worker's cellphone and post them here.

 

Mike

[HardZero]

Sadly I haven't see much old stuff outside of the hobby circles. We did get a old Gateway computer with a original install of Windows NT that someone brought in that they had for home use.

[Algus]

The oldest computer I ever used for a practical purpose was a 386 that I learned BASIC on when I was a freshman in High School. The 386 was already 15 years old by then, though I believe the computers were only ten years old or so.

 

We use some really old command line stuff at work but the machines are relatively new, it's just the software that is old.

[barrym95838]

I finally caught my smog inspection machine in a crash. I grabbed my co-worker's cell phone and took some snapshots of the black screen of death and the reboot of the OS/2 Warp system. This machine was installed sometime in 1998, and is still going strong after many thousands of hours of use and abuse.

 

http://atariage.com/forums/gallery/album/1309-os2-warp-screen-snapshots/

 

Mike

Edited December 16, 2014 by barrym95838

[+FujiSkunk]

So did you contact your service representative like it told you to?

[MarkO]

I finally caught my smog inspection machine in a crash. I grabbed my co-worker's cell phone and took some snapshots of the black screen of death and the reboot of the OS/2 Warp system. This machine was installed sometime in 1998, and is still going strong after many thousands of hours of use and abuse.

 

http://atariage.com/forums/gallery/album/1309-os2-warp-screen-snapshots/

 

Mike

It looks like you Application Trapped. But it recovered after a Reboot... And when was the last time it was rebooted???? This system has been up for a year or two??

 

MarkO

[barrym95838]

It looks like you Application Trapped. But it recovered after a Reboot... And when was the last time it was rebooted???? This system has been up for a year or two??

 

MarkO

It crashes about once or twice a month on average. It sits on the main menu during business hours, and goes into some sort of standby overnight, There was one day a few years ago when it crashed three times in a couple of hours, but that was because the power was flaky from a raging thunderstorm in the area.

 

There seem to be three different types of crashes:

 

The first is the black screen of death, and seems to be triggered by external glitches, from the line power or the dynamometer lift and/or RPM probe.

 

The second is a simple freeze-up. This usually happens when exiting the exhaust manual sampling mode screen.

 

The third is the most interesting, and usually happens after the machine has been up for a few weeks. The routine that is supposed to render the screen fonts starts to malfunction, dropping letters, and getting quickly and progressively worse, until the screen is almost blank except for the highlighting cursor. I know the menus so well that I have completed an inspection with almost nothing but a cursor remaining. This seems to be from corrupted font data, probably due to a (very gradual) memory leak in the code somewhere.

 

In all three cases, a power-down and reset works like a charm. The application software is designed to discourage any snooping around, so it's hard for me to give any details of the operating system specifics (no command prompt available). About eight years ago, a software update was force down-loaded overnight, but an error in one of the download scripts froze the machine, making it unusable. ESP had to scramble through the s**t storm of complaints from hundreds of customers, and sent field techs out to each machine to manually unlock them and fix the software.

 

Other than a few problems with the sampling bench pump and sensors, and the tamper detection battery, the machine is a joy to use, and I don't see a replacement showing up anytime soon. There is some talk that 1995 and older model year vehicles will eventually be exempted from the California smog check program, in which case the machine would only be useful for diagnosis and repair verification, but that might not happen for several more years.

 

Mike

Edited December 18, 2014 by barrym95838

[bfutrel]

For me the oldest machine that I have seen in use is a generic PC at work that controls our HVAC system.

 

Pentium 66mhz

48MB RAM

1.2 GB hard drive

OS/2 Warp V3

 

It was installed around 1994-1995. While the HVAC would run without it the machine allows temperatures to be adjusted. Of course we have no manuals to the software on the computer. While there is Windows software available it requires upgrading all of the sensors in the building. Until that is done I'll keep it going.

 

When we moved in that 1.2GB hard disk was extremely noisy. I cloned the drive to a couple of 2GB industrial-grade Compact Flash cards and have one of them connected to a Compact Flash to IDE adapter. So far so good and I have a spare in case the CF card dies.

 

It crashes every once in a while when using the HVAC software. Otherwise it is pretty solid.

[Streck]

A fellow on another forum I post at reports that his company still uses Apple II's, in 2015, to control CNC machines. I've requested photos and will post if/when they're available!

[Rhomaios]

I wish I had thought to nab a 25 year old computer from Blockbuster when they started shutting down, but I didn't have the room back then, and I had already left them for other work long before. Those machines were super old.

[MarkO]

A fellow on another forum I post at reports that his company still uses Apple II's, in 2015, to control CNC machines. I've requested photos and will post if/when they're available!

 

 

Check Out this Video!!

 

( Start at 0:55 Seconds if your impatient... )

 

 

MarkO