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GNU emacs has been in continuous production for something like 35 years, and it's somewhat difficult to imagine it ever going away. Is there an older piece of

GNU emacs has been in continuous production for something like 35 years, and it's somewhat difficult to imagine it ever going away. Is there an older piece of software that we still routinely use?

killercup 7y ago
Tar was released in '79 iirc, so it's about the same age.
- boutad 7y ago
  I imagine most modern users of tar are using GNU Tar or libarchive bsdtar. Are there any current tar implementations that can be directly traced to the original?
  - kjs3 7y ago
    The BSD's tar is derived from the old 4BSD tar which was derived from the original. Pretty sure SCO Unix (yes, you can still buy it) is System V tar. Probably Solaris, too. I recall AIX tar is...something else, none of the above. I don't recall the details.
    - boutad 7y ago
      According to the man page for bsdtar that ships with Ubuntu A tar command appeared in Seventh Edition Unix, which was released in January, 1979. There have been numerous other implementations, many of which extended the file format. John Gilmore's pdtar public-domain implementation (circa November, 1987) was quite influential, and formed the basis of GNU tar. GNU tar was included as the standard system tar in FreeBSD beginning with FreeBSD 1.0. This is a complete re-implementation based on the libarchive(3) library. It was first released with FreeBSD 5.4 in May, 2005.
      - kjs3 7y ago
        Ah...my bad. OpenBSD tar has Berkeley copyrights. Looks like Free/NetBSD don't. I made a bad assumption there. Thanks.
mschaef 7y ago
Mainframes are a good place to look. IBM VM dates back to 1972. IBM's other mainframe operating systems trace their lineage back to OS/360, which is 1966. The XEDIT editor is 1980. I believe codebases for all of the above are still in active development and are certainly in active use.
Isamu 7y ago
TeX: 1978 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TeX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TeX which is underlying the LaTeX set of macros and stuff that is still in use for academic papers. [edit] Also TeX is a good example to bring up as an early example of a complex system that was intended to have freely available source code (before the term "open source" and before GNU). When he created TeX, Knuth said there was a lack of example source code that could be freely examined by students and others in the field, so he released the code and in fact published it in book form along with the source for Metafont and the code for the Computer Modern fonts.
jandrese 7y ago
A lot of Unix utilities date back to Bell Labs, at least in spirit. Many had to be rewritten due to AT&T becoming dickbags with the licensing back in the 90s. Stuff like cat, sed, awk, od, dc, head, vi, echo, sh, uniq, diff, sort, and so on.
nathell 7y ago
Maxima, the computer algebra system that is still actively maintained, started out as Macsyma in 1968.
- downerending 7y ago
  Didn't even know it had been renamed. Now I really feel old...
  - nathell 7y ago
    Not exactly renamed, just forked in 1982 and open-sourced.
- CJefferson 7y ago
  Gap, a computational group theory system isn't quite as old, but it has been going since 1986 making it 30 years old.
lqet 7y ago
BLAS [0] and LAPACK [1], which are used for example in Numpy, have been written in Fortran in the 70ies. vi is from 1976 [2] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BLAS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BLAS [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LAPACK https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LAPACK [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vi
kjs3 7y ago
IBM ACP (Airline Control Program) was originally a S/360 OS optimized for transaction processing that underlies things like the PARS airline reservation system and the card authorization systems at AmEx. It has been under continuous development and evolution since, I believe, 1969. Along the way it became ACP/TPF (Transaction Processing Facility) and then just TPF. It's now called z/TPF and runs on the latest zSeries mainframes. I suspect, due to it's widespread use in embedded systems of all sorts, there will be things still running MS-DOS 50 years from now.

GNU emacs has been in continuous production for something like 35 years, and it's somewhat difficult to imagine it ever going away. Is there an older piece of software that we still routinely use?

killercup 7y ago

Tar was released in '79 iirc, so it's about the same age.

boutad 7y ago
I imagine most modern users of tar are using GNU Tar or libarchive bsdtar. Are there any current tar implementations that can be directly traced to the original?
- kjs3 7y ago
  The BSD's tar is derived from the old 4BSD tar which was derived from the original. Pretty sure SCO Unix (yes, you can still buy it) is System V tar. Probably Solaris, too. I recall AIX tar is...something else, none of the above. I don't recall the details.
  - boutad 7y ago
    According to the man page for bsdtar that ships with Ubuntu A tar command appeared in Seventh Edition Unix, which was released in January, 1979. There have been numerous other implementations, many of which extended the file format. John Gilmore's pdtar public-domain implementation (circa November, 1987) was quite influential, and formed the basis of GNU tar. GNU tar was included as the standard system tar in FreeBSD beginning with FreeBSD 1.0. This is a complete re-implementation based on the libarchive(3) library. It was first released with FreeBSD 5.4 in May, 2005.
    - kjs3 7y ago
      Ah...my bad. OpenBSD tar has Berkeley copyrights. Looks like Free/NetBSD don't. I made a bad assumption there. Thanks.

mschaef 7y ago

Mainframes are a good place to look. IBM VM dates back to 1972. IBM's other mainframe operating systems trace their lineage back to OS/360, which is 1966. The XEDIT editor is 1980. I believe codebases for all of the above are still in active development and are certainly in active use.

Isamu 7y ago

TeX: 1978 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TeX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TeX which is underlying the LaTeX set of macros and stuff that is still in use for academic papers. [edit] Also TeX is a good example to bring up as an early example of a complex system that was intended to have freely available source code (before the term "open source" and before GNU). When he created TeX, Knuth said there was a lack of example source code that could be freely examined by students and others in the field, so he released the code and in fact published it in book form along with the source for Metafont and the code for the Computer Modern fonts.

jandrese 7y ago

A lot of Unix utilities date back to Bell Labs, at least in spirit. Many had to be rewritten due to AT&T becoming dickbags with the licensing back in the 90s. Stuff like cat, sed, awk, od, dc, head, vi, echo, sh, uniq, diff, sort, and so on.

nathell 7y ago

Maxima, the computer algebra system that is still actively maintained, started out as Macsyma in 1968.

downerending 7y ago
Didn't even know it had been renamed. Now I really feel old...
- nathell 7y ago
  Not exactly renamed, just forked in 1982 and open-sourced.
CJefferson 7y ago
Gap, a computational group theory system isn't quite as old, but it has been going since 1986 making it 30 years old.

lqet 7y ago

BLAS [0] and LAPACK [1], which are used for example in Numpy, have been written in Fortran in the 70ies. vi is from 1976 [2] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BLAS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BLAS [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LAPACK https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LAPACK [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vi

kjs3 7y ago

IBM ACP (Airline Control Program) was originally a S/360 OS optimized for transaction processing that underlies things like the PARS airline reservation system and the card authorization systems at AmEx. It has been under continuous development and evolution since, I believe, 1969. Along the way it became ACP/TPF (Transaction Processing Facility) and then just TPF. It's now called z/TPF and runs on the latest zSeries mainframes. I suspect, due to it's widespread use in embedded systems of all sorts, there will be things still running MS-DOS 50 years from now.