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Ask HN: What's the oldest software you still use today?

19 points by onuralp ↗ HN
Inspired by the thread on ever-lasting software.

51 comments

[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 105 ms ] thread
boznz
winamp 2.7 from 2001 for my mp3s. Still works fine on windows 10
iforgotpassword
Nah, need 5 for Unicode support. :) using the classic skin it's pretty much the same.
vivalibre
Oldest as in oldest origin or oldest release?

Irfanview comes to mind as the default image viewer for Windows

facorreia
Probably vim.
beatgammit
I use vi on occasion when I'm in a new BSD box and haven't installed vim yet, so there's that.
billfruit
ed, emacs.
Isamu
I 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
Do you actually use Ed, or the series of other programs that are based on it, like vi(m) and sed?
billfruit
I occasionally try to use ed as a distraction free editor.
digital_voodoo
Winamp 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
Why 5.6, specifically? What was it about that version?
zrobotics
That's the last official release, 5.7 & 5.8 are leaked betas.
tartuffe78
Because it really whips the llama's ass!
juangacovas
Aimp is a good windows piece of software too
nickelcitymario
Deoxyribonucleic acid
gumby
It's a shame the source has been lost so everybody has to modify the object code in situ. An utter revision control disaster!
erulabs
Or, potentially, the best version control system ever? Automatically forgetting dead code is a pretty sweet feature :P
gumby
Sadly there's tons of dead code just lying around in the chromosomes just waiting to be activated.
cheeko1234
VLC for sure.

>The VideoLan software originated as an academic project in 1996

Udik
PaintShop Pro 7, about 18 years old.
juangacovas
Paint Shop Pro 5 and 9 here
vmh1928
PSP 5 here. Build date of March 30, 1998.
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hyperman1
Xixit!

If only for the music tracks.

kareiva
My 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.
jbarberu
Assuming we count recent versions of old-school software mine are:

foobar2000 vim (I was still being breastfed when Bram started)

ashleyn
Oldest still supported? Probably gotta be GCC.

Oldest unsupported? I have some VB6 tools I use to make tilesets for Sega Genesis homebrews.

egypturnash
Does 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

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
GNU grep. If you cheat and count years since the original grep it's pretty old.
yesenadam
Not 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/List_of_Unix_commands

iron0013
Cool Edit Pro (Adobe Audition has never been nearly as good)
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creed0r
I 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...