7 ms·
Ask HN: What's the oldest software you still use today?
Inspired by the thread on ever-lasting software.
- boznz 8y agowinamp 2.7 from 2001 for my mp3s. Still works fine on windows 10
- iforgotpassword 8y agoNah, need 5 for Unicode support. :) using the classic skin it's pretty much the same.
- vivalibre 8y agoOldest as in oldest origin or oldest release? Irfanview comes to mind as the default image viewer for Windows
- facorreia 8y agoProbably vim.
- beatgammit 8y agoI use vi on occasion when I'm in a new BSD box and haven't installed vim yet, so there's that.
- billfruit 8y agoed, emacs.
- Isamu 8y agoI 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.
- beatgammit 8y agoDo you actually use Ed, or the series of other programs that are based on it, like vi(m) and sed?
- billfruit 8y agoI occasionally try to use ed as a distraction free editor.
- altsyset 8y agoWordPress?
- digital_voodoo 8y agoWinamp 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...
- nickelcitymario 8y agoWhy 5.6, specifically? What was it about that version?
- zrobotics 8y agoThat's the last official release, 5.7 & 5.8 are leaked betas.
- nickelcitymario 8y agoWell, that makes perfect sense.
- tartuffe78 8y agoBecause it really whips the llama's ass!
- juangacovas 8y agoAimp is a good windows piece of software too
- DerekRobot 8y agoI'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 https://gist.github.com/pete/665971
- detuur 8y agoGNU coreutils.
- nickelcitymario 8y agoDeoxyribonucleic acid
- gumby 8y agoIt's a shame the source has been lost so everybody has to modify the object code in situ. An utter revision control disaster!
- erulabs 8y agoOr, potentially, the best version control system ever? Automatically forgetting dead code is a pretty sweet feature :P
- gumby 8y agoSadly there's tons of dead code just lying around in the chromosomes just waiting to be activated.
- stcredzero 8y agoWe've already started the reversing effort: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QHIocNOHd7A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QHIocNOHd7A
- cheeko1234 8y agoVLC for sure. >The VideoLan software originated as an academic project in 1996
- Udik 8y agoPaintShop Pro 7, about 18 years old.
- juangacovas 8y agoPaint Shop Pro 5 and 9 here
- vmh1928 8y agoPSP 5 here. Build date of March 30, 1998.
- reallydude 8y agols for showing files.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- hyperman1 8y agoXixit! If only for the music tracks.
- kareiva 8y agoMy 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.
- supercanuck 8y agoSAP
- jbarberu 8y agoAssuming we count recent versions of old-school software mine are: foobar2000 vim (I was still being breastfed when Bram started)
- ashleyn 8y agoOldest still supported? Probably gotta be GCC. Oldest unsupported? I have some VB6 tools I use to make tilesets for Sega Genesis homebrews.
- egypturnash 8y agoDoes 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 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.
- Foober223 8y agoGNU grep. If you cheat and count years since the original grep it's pretty old.
- yesenadam 8y agoNot 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/Ship_of_Theseus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Unix_commands https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Unix_commands
- iron0013 8y agoCool Edit Pro (Adobe Audition has never been nearly as good)
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- clort 8y agoI 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) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xv_(software)
- whateveracct 8y agoEmacs and GHC
- creed0r 8y agoI 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...
- I_complete_me 8y agoWarning: 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...
- stcredzero 8y agoI 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!
- beatgammit 8y agoI 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?
- stcredzero 8y agoI don't know. I got downvoted, so apparently I'm doing it right!
- I_complete_me 8y agoActually, I like your sense of humour.
- esmi 8y agoMaybe tar? First version is from 1979. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tar_(computing) 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.
- stcredzero 8y agoOn the gaming side: Star Control 2: The Ur-Quan Masters. I'll still play Battlezone once in awhile, which goes back to 1980.
- cimmanom 8y agoCommand 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
- rekabis 8y agoI 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.