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Let's define "still in use," because that's the heart of the question. Technically speaking, I'm sure someone could dig an Apple IIc out of storage somewhere an
by jonnathanson 13y ago
Let's define "still in use," because that's the heart of the question. Technically speaking, I'm sure someone could dig an Apple IIc out of storage somewhere and successfully run a game on it. Hell, someone out there might be doing that right now. To me, that anecdotal experience doesn't translate into "in use."
I'd define "in use" to mean still in productive service to a group of people or institutions significant enough to represent a niche market.
For that, I'd probably look to things like avionics software in certain airplanes, navigation systems on old ships, firmware in medical devices and diagnostics, or perhaps to inventory management systems in old warehouses.
And who knows what firmware we loaded onto our Cold War-era ICBMs, for that matter? Or what dusty, backwards-compatible systems we would need to maintain control over them? Would anyone like to play a game? :)
- tjr 13y agoSimilarly: I worked on some avionics networking software a few years back, written in C, and a surprisingly old version of GCC (I think from the late 1990's, in 2006-2007, so approximately a decade old then) was being used. That particular version had already been qualified for avionics development at the company, and to upgrade to a newer version would have meant assuming the cost of requalification. Just so long as the old compiler worked well enough, they had no reason to upgrade. (I did uncover a bug in the compiler which I had to work around, but wasn't enough to warrant an upgrade.)