10 ms·

What Is the Oldest Computer Program Still in Use?

138 points by amalantony06 10y ago

russellbeattie 10y ago
Because of its longevity, replacing the program will essentially mean replicating all the logic so that its input and output is perfectly duplicated - including any bugs or quirks it has. Any differences, I'm sure, will end up causing a domino effect of failures and inaccuracies in all the other antiquated systems this program talks to. So then the question becomes, "why bother?" and 58 years later it still chugs along. I know of code I personally wrote over a decade ago still being used in production happily every day, so I'm sure this is bound to be a much more common experience in the years to come.
- iaw 10y ago
  It was written by Grace Hopper, there are no bugs ;)
  - portlander12345 10y ago
    They wouldn't dare.
    - iaw 10y ago
      The first thing I did was scan the article for her name. She was such an amazing person in so many ways that I'm in awe.
timthelion 10y ago
"You can still find antique green-screen systems if you look hard—in some cases, a pleasant Web interface just disguises the old guts." - There is so much wrong with this sentiment! It's just kind of folded in there, the insinuation that "web interfaces are more pleasant" than TUIs. I cannot express how much this kind of writting annoys me. Why can't they tell the story without wedging in unbacked opinions. The sentence "You can still find antique green-screen systems if you look hard—in some cases, a Web interface just disguises the old guts." would work just as well.
- bunderbunder 10y ago
  I think that you might be very nearly alone in your sentiment that green screens offer as good a user interface as more recent technologies.
  - timthelion 10y ago
    Me and three upvotes in however many minutes. Plus all the old ladies at the supermarket who can enter a product code into the terminal without even looking at the screen, because the rules for what element is focused are so simple.
    - laichzeit0 10y ago
      I agree that terminals are more "productive". One of the reasons that the mouse based interfaces gained such traction is that the sales people pitched it as "you can teach someone to use this interface in X amount of time" where X is orders of magnitude less than using a terminal interface. Like saying that Nodepad is quicker to learn than Emacs or Vim. This is true at face value, the trade off is that you pay for it later on as people become productive with it. Alas, cutting down "training time" and the costs involved with this for new employees is something bean counters can measure.
  - notalaser 10y ago
    As "more recent technologies", probably not. (At least as good) as the non-native, slowly-responding, glitchy web UIs that are so hip lately, most likely yes, especially when it comes to tasks like data entry and the like.
    - frik 10y ago
      Give me a good responsive web app, mobile Android/iOS app, Win32 app or TUI app over ugly not so responsive XAML Win10 apps or SAP screens.
  - dingaling 10y ago
    From talking to the sales & service agents at ${COMPANY} after prototyping some 'New Generation' systems we determined that Web-based UIs had two advantages: 1. Multi-column layout with independent updates. Useful for presenting prompts and help information beside the main transaction window. 2. AJAX-style dynamic updates on data-selection. Other than that there were few advantages to Web UI. In fact we had to spend some time developing Javascript functionality such as tab-order and F-key capture that are elementary, 'free' features with green-screen and which greatly improve transaction speed. Any 5250 terminal emulator from the 1990s onwards offered copy-and-paste and multi-session capabilities so a Web UI didn't offer advantage there.
stevenjgarner 10y ago
Emacs and vi date back to at least 1976: http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/bitwise/2014/05/oldest_software_rivalry_emacs_and_vi_two_text_editors_used_by_programmers.html http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/bitwise/2014/05/old...
throwawayish 10y ago
Notedly it runs on a very small configuration of an IBM mainframe (z10 BC - 8 GB of RAM), costing less than 100k USD.
- tyingq 10y ago
  Not practical/legal due to IBM licensing, but the open source hercules emulator is stable enough to even run current z/OS on a linux box: http://pastebin.com/umhdBsPu http://pastebin.com/umhdBsPu
toolslive 10y ago
what about these ? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barrel_organ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barrel_organ
- flashman 10y ago
  Is an organ really in the 'computer' class of machine? It doesn't "carry out an arbitrary set of arithmetic or logical operations," to quote the Wikipedia definition. A barrel organ could be said to follow a 'program', if we're loose enough to mean 'a set of machine-readable instructions that cause a process to take place' but it is in no sense calculating a result based on logical operations.
protomikron 10y ago
Slightly off-topic, but meta user interface relevant: IMHO Google has been so successful because of their user interface and not because of its superior algorithm. In essence it is a REPL where the E part is slightly non-trivial. But I agree it is the best user interface. Files and processes are a great thing, but the shell built on-top of it glues everything together and for me is the most successful interface. However it would be nice to switch interpreters online, i.e. switch between e.g. Bash or Python and "human language" (like Google Search). Interestingly DuckDuckGo provides something similar via its '!' syntax.
- metaxy2 10y ago
  I think at least at first, Google's success was definitely because of the algorithm. Existing search engines were terrible. They primarily relied on text analysis and human edited web directories. You could search for something as basic as "pet food" and get a few relevant results and then a bunch of random garbage. When Google came out using PageRank, it was a whole new world. Every tech savvy person I know switched right away, and not because of the interface. But no doubt the simple and elegant interface helped too, and has helped them stay ahead as the other search engines have caught up with their algorithm.
  - nickpsecurity 10y ago
    I agree. That PageRank was patented is only reason Google is what they are today. They would've been copycatted to much lower revenues or market share.
    - katzgrau 10y ago
      That, and the recognition that search was a powerful conduit for ad revenue is the reason that Google is what they are today. Jerry Yang and Yahoo did not appreciate this and missed their oppurtunity to acquire Google early on. That said, Yahoo would have fumbled it even if they had pulled the trigger.
    - nl 10y ago
      That's completely untrue. There were numerous well-understood PageRank alternatives available at the time (eg HITS was published in 1999[1]). Google did lots of things right (good algorithm, good scaling, good UI, text-based advertising, spam handling, no portal etc), and to say it was "only PageRank" is just wrong. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HITS_algorithm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HITS_algorithm
dllthomas 10y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus
zigzigzag 10y ago
I think the more interesting thing about these ancient programs is the question of why projects to modernise them fail over and over again. Of course we can already guess many of the answers without even reading any post-mortems, but obviously these organisations were able to execute complex IT projects once upon a time and over the years lost that ability, leaving them stranded with ancient systems. In the case of MOCAS I'm going to assume it's all of the standard reasons: weak management, absence of competition, over-reliance on the same small pool of defence contractors that know how to navigate byzantine federal procurement rules, etc.
- coldtea 10y ago
  >I think the more interesting thing about these ancient programs is the question of why projects to modernise them fail over and over again. A lot of it is because they fail the KISS principle.
  - bch 10y ago
    Specifically, suffer from second system effect [0]. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect
    - coldtea 10y ago
      Yeah. They should just replicate 100% the old system first, and then, only after testing, and 1-2 years on, start adding any new features...
      - craigvn 10y ago
        How do you justify to the person paying for it that you are are going to spend money to build essentially the same system? Often they don't really care if it is COBOL rather than something newer. The only way to justify is if the maintenance costs are higher than the redevelopment costs.
        10y ago
sho_hn 10y ago
> It’s widely accepted that the first computer program was written by Ada King, Countess of Lovelace, in 1842 Hmm. Hasn't this been widely disputed and disproven? I wonder why it keeps being circulated, and with such a bold tone.
toomanybeersies 10y ago
Ironically (I think? Or is it Fittingly?), they're probably using MOCAS to try and find a replacement for MOCAS.
drdeadringer 10y ago
My first real job out of college, classic DoD contractor gig, I walked in and was shown the spiffy VAX I was going to be using. I didn't know which was older, the computer or me. There's one sitting in the Computer History MUseum in Mountain View. Wirewrap, 4mb of RAM maximum and each 1mb was a square foot of circuit-board you'd have to slide in and lock into place with thumb-tabs. I felt my own obsolescent like an angry itch every day I showed up for work and turned it on. The way I understand it, the Navy got tired of supporting that. "If you want more of our money, you'll upgrade this crap." So they did, and now it's one server rack with, wouldn't you know, such modern things like USB ports and 21st century OSs and ethernet capability. But that's crazy talk.
drdeadringer 10y ago
I read a book by Vernor Vinge where the main character did some software archeology as part of his hobby and technological interests. He discovered that the program used to keep time was viciously ancient, and after looking into "epoch" figured that the old-calendar year "1970" must have been decided upon because "that was when humanity first landed on the moon".
bigiain 10y ago
For me, I still occasionally get a server monitoring email from a cron job running a Perl program that first mailed me in April '97. I've got no idea who's keeping that running... The "startup" I wrote that for (and later went to work for) has been dead a decade now. (Scary though: this might mean _someone_ is still running a Redhat 5 or 6 linux machine or VM - that's a late'90's vintage Redhat, not Redhat Enterprise Linux. It's _possible_ I updated that Perl script when we moved to CentOS in the early 2000's, but surely if anyne's been updating it since then - they'd surely have taken my personal email address out of it???)
pogo 10y ago
Here's a great article with many more examples: http://www.pcworld.com/article/249951/computers/if-it-aint-broke-dont-fix-it-ancient-computers-in-use-today.html http://www.pcworld.com/article/249951/computers/if-it-aint-b... My favorite is the 90 yr old Texas company that uses an IBM 402 from 1948. The computer uses plugboards - breadboard-like cards that are programmed by plugging wires like a patch panel. As of the date of the article (2012) they still used the plugboards, as well as a more modern card reader/puncher. Edit: I just realized my example is also mentioned in the OP article, though there is more detail (and photos) in the PCWorld article I linked.

138 points by amalantony06 10y ago

Because of its longevity, replacing the program will essentially mean replicating all the logic so that its input and output is perfectly duplicated - including any bugs or quirks it has. Any differences, I'm sure, will end up causing a domino effect of failures and inaccuracies in all the other antiquated systems this program talks to. So then the question becomes, "why bother?" and 58 years later it still chugs along. I know of code I personally wrote over a decade ago still being used in production happily every day, so I'm sure this is bound to be a much more common experience in the years to come.

iaw 10y ago
It was written by Grace Hopper, there are no bugs ;)
- portlander12345 10y ago
  They wouldn't dare.
  - iaw 10y ago
    The first thing I did was scan the article for her name. She was such an amazing person in so many ways that I'm in awe.

timthelion 10y ago

"You can still find antique green-screen systems if you look hard—in some cases, a pleasant Web interface just disguises the old guts." - There is so much wrong with this sentiment! It's just kind of folded in there, the insinuation that "web interfaces are more pleasant" than TUIs. I cannot express how much this kind of writting annoys me. Why can't they tell the story without wedging in unbacked opinions. The sentence "You can still find antique green-screen systems if you look hard—in some cases, a Web interface just disguises the old guts." would work just as well.

bunderbunder 10y ago
I think that you might be very nearly alone in your sentiment that green screens offer as good a user interface as more recent technologies.
- timthelion 10y ago
  Me and three upvotes in however many minutes. Plus all the old ladies at the supermarket who can enter a product code into the terminal without even looking at the screen, because the rules for what element is focused are so simple.
  - laichzeit0 10y ago
    I agree that terminals are more "productive". One of the reasons that the mouse based interfaces gained such traction is that the sales people pitched it as "you can teach someone to use this interface in X amount of time" where X is orders of magnitude less than using a terminal interface. Like saying that Nodepad is quicker to learn than Emacs or Vim. This is true at face value, the trade off is that you pay for it later on as people become productive with it. Alas, cutting down "training time" and the costs involved with this for new employees is something bean counters can measure.
- notalaser 10y ago
  As "more recent technologies", probably not. (At least as good) as the non-native, slowly-responding, glitchy web UIs that are so hip lately, most likely yes, especially when it comes to tasks like data entry and the like.
  - frik 10y ago
    Give me a good responsive web app, mobile Android/iOS app, Win32 app or TUI app over ugly not so responsive XAML Win10 apps or SAP screens.
- dingaling 10y ago
  From talking to the sales & service agents at ${COMPANY} after prototyping some 'New Generation' systems we determined that Web-based UIs had two advantages: 1. Multi-column layout with independent updates. Useful for presenting prompts and help information beside the main transaction window. 2. AJAX-style dynamic updates on data-selection. Other than that there were few advantages to Web UI. In fact we had to spend some time developing Javascript functionality such as tab-order and F-key capture that are elementary, 'free' features with green-screen and which greatly improve transaction speed. Any 5250 terminal emulator from the 1990s onwards offered copy-and-paste and multi-session capabilities so a Web UI didn't offer advantage there.

stevenjgarner 10y ago

Emacs and vi date back to at least 1976: http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/bitwise/2014/05/oldest_software_rivalry_emacs_and_vi_two_text_editors_used_by_programmers.html http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/bitwise/2014/05/old...

throwawayish 10y ago

Notedly it runs on a very small configuration of an IBM mainframe (z10 BC - 8 GB of RAM), costing less than 100k USD.

tyingq 10y ago
Not practical/legal due to IBM licensing, but the open source hercules emulator is stable enough to even run current z/OS on a linux box: http://pastebin.com/umhdBsPu http://pastebin.com/umhdBsPu

toolslive 10y ago

what about these ? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barrel_organ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barrel_organ

flashman 10y ago
Is an organ really in the 'computer' class of machine? It doesn't "carry out an arbitrary set of arithmetic or logical operations," to quote the Wikipedia definition. A barrel organ could be said to follow a 'program', if we're loose enough to mean 'a set of machine-readable instructions that cause a process to take place' but it is in no sense calculating a result based on logical operations.

protomikron 10y ago

Slightly off-topic, but meta user interface relevant: IMHO Google has been so successful because of their user interface and not because of its superior algorithm. In essence it is a REPL where the E part is slightly non-trivial. But I agree it is the best user interface. Files and processes are a great thing, but the shell built on-top of it glues everything together and for me is the most successful interface. However it would be nice to switch interpreters online, i.e. switch between e.g. Bash or Python and "human language" (like Google Search). Interestingly DuckDuckGo provides something similar via its '!' syntax.

metaxy2 10y ago
I think at least at first, Google's success was definitely because of the algorithm. Existing search engines were terrible. They primarily relied on text analysis and human edited web directories. You could search for something as basic as "pet food" and get a few relevant results and then a bunch of random garbage. When Google came out using PageRank, it was a whole new world. Every tech savvy person I know switched right away, and not because of the interface. But no doubt the simple and elegant interface helped too, and has helped them stay ahead as the other search engines have caught up with their algorithm.
- nickpsecurity 10y ago
  I agree. That PageRank was patented is only reason Google is what they are today. They would've been copycatted to much lower revenues or market share.
  - katzgrau 10y ago
    That, and the recognition that search was a powerful conduit for ad revenue is the reason that Google is what they are today. Jerry Yang and Yahoo did not appreciate this and missed their oppurtunity to acquire Google early on. That said, Yahoo would have fumbled it even if they had pulled the trigger.
  - nl 10y ago
    That's completely untrue. There were numerous well-understood PageRank alternatives available at the time (eg HITS was published in 1999[1]). Google did lots of things right (good algorithm, good scaling, good UI, text-based advertising, spam handling, no portal etc), and to say it was "only PageRank" is just wrong. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HITS_algorithm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HITS_algorithm

dllthomas 10y ago

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

zigzigzag 10y ago

I think the more interesting thing about these ancient programs is the question of why projects to modernise them fail over and over again. Of course we can already guess many of the answers without even reading any post-mortems, but obviously these organisations were able to execute complex IT projects once upon a time and over the years lost that ability, leaving them stranded with ancient systems. In the case of MOCAS I'm going to assume it's all of the standard reasons: weak management, absence of competition, over-reliance on the same small pool of defence contractors that know how to navigate byzantine federal procurement rules, etc.

coldtea 10y ago
>I think the more interesting thing about these ancient programs is the question of why projects to modernise them fail over and over again. A lot of it is because they fail the KISS principle.
- bch 10y ago
  Specifically, suffer from second system effect [0]. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect
  - coldtea 10y ago
    Yeah. They should just replicate 100% the old system first, and then, only after testing, and 1-2 years on, start adding any new features...
    - craigvn 10y ago
      How do you justify to the person paying for it that you are are going to spend money to build essentially the same system? Often they don't really care if it is COBOL rather than something newer. The only way to justify is if the maintenance costs are higher than the redevelopment costs.
      - 10y ago

sho_hn 10y ago

> It’s widely accepted that the first computer program was written by Ada King, Countess of Lovelace, in 1842 Hmm. Hasn't this been widely disputed and disproven? I wonder why it keeps being circulated, and with such a bold tone.

toomanybeersies 10y ago

Ironically (I think? Or is it Fittingly?), they're probably using MOCAS to try and find a replacement for MOCAS.

drdeadringer 10y ago

My first real job out of college, classic DoD contractor gig, I walked in and was shown the spiffy VAX I was going to be using. I didn't know which was older, the computer or me. There's one sitting in the Computer History MUseum in Mountain View. Wirewrap, 4mb of RAM maximum and each 1mb was a square foot of circuit-board you'd have to slide in and lock into place with thumb-tabs. I felt my own obsolescent like an angry itch every day I showed up for work and turned it on. The way I understand it, the Navy got tired of supporting that. "If you want more of our money, you'll upgrade this crap." So they did, and now it's one server rack with, wouldn't you know, such modern things like USB ports and 21st century OSs and ethernet capability. But that's crazy talk.

drdeadringer 10y ago

I read a book by Vernor Vinge where the main character did some software archeology as part of his hobby and technological interests. He discovered that the program used to keep time was viciously ancient, and after looking into "epoch" figured that the old-calendar year "1970" must have been decided upon because "that was when humanity first landed on the moon".

bigiain 10y ago

For me, I still occasionally get a server monitoring email from a cron job running a Perl program that first mailed me in April '97. I've got no idea who's keeping that running... The "startup" I wrote that for (and later went to work for) has been dead a decade now. (Scary though: this might mean _someone_ is still running a Redhat 5 or 6 linux machine or VM - that's a late'90's vintage Redhat, not Redhat Enterprise Linux. It's _possible_ I updated that Perl script when we moved to CentOS in the early 2000's, but surely if anyne's been updating it since then - they'd surely have taken my personal email address out of it???)

pogo 10y ago

Here's a great article with many more examples: http://www.pcworld.com/article/249951/computers/if-it-aint-broke-dont-fix-it-ancient-computers-in-use-today.html http://www.pcworld.com/article/249951/computers/if-it-aint-b... My favorite is the 90 yr old Texas company that uses an IBM 402 from 1948. The computer uses plugboards - breadboard-like cards that are programmed by plugging wires like a patch panel. As of the date of the article (2012) they still used the plugboards, as well as a more modern card reader/puncher. Edit: I just realized my example is also mentioned in the OP article, though there is more detail (and photos) in the PCWorld article I linked.