Whats the oldest piece of software in your environment?

Fulcrum45

We typically look at the age of hardware in most environments before anything else- and it makes sense. Things get old and they break. Same typically applies to software and somehow, through some miracle of God, we have software that keeps on chugging. What's the oldest software you have in your environment- or the oldest "in production" software you've witnessed? We have a particular piece of software that's 15 years old. It crashes here and there but in general works well. I joke that it's almost old enough to drive.

BerkshireHerd

I work in banking, many of the critical piece of software that run the systems are old. Cant say age exactly, some of these software suites are way to valuable to try to upgrade due to risk of critical failure

triplea

We sadly have an access2 system that is still very live and used daily.

SAD!

JoJoCal19

Incredibly we have a production server running Server 2000 . And our InfoSec team seems to have no pull to force the upgrade. Amazing.

MTciscoguy

JoJoCal19 wrote: »

Incredibly we have a production server running Server 2000 . And our InfoSec team seems to have no pull to force the upgrade. Amazing.

Quite a few of the companies I do contract work for are still running 2000, it is not uncommon, upgrades can be expensive and disruptive, many of the companies in my area have the attitude if it ain't broke, why change it!

Verities

JoJoCal19 wrote: »

Incredibly we have a production server running Server 2000 . And our InfoSec team seems to have no pull to force the upgrade. Amazing.

Hah! We found one running in our environment earlier this year and were told to power it off instead of decommissioning it. The oldest software we have running right now is Solaris 8.

J_86

I see things that are pretty old almost every day. Phone systems that are 15+ years old, Server 2000, Windows XP, old software that vendors won't touch or support anymore, the list goes on. Thankfully where I work we generally will not get involved with anything if the vendor does not support the software or with hardware that the customer does not plan on upgrading. I get that upgrading can be costly and possibly breaking things, but there is no way using Windows 2000 or ancient software is a good business decision. The longer you wait to upgrade, the more painful and costly upgrading is going to be.

techfiend

Proprietary software from 98 but it doesn't look that dated except for the installer, new program is being developed. Otherwise still some XP workstations and all 2003 servers, all soon to be gone.

JoJoCal19

MTciscoguy wrote: »

Quite a few of the companies I do contract work for are still running 2000, it is not uncommon, upgrades can be expensive and disruptive, many of the companies in my area have the attitude if it ain't broke, why change it!

Yea well, my employer has hundreds of thousands if not more peoples' PII of every kind imaginable sitting on our servers, and I haven't even bothered to look on exploit DBs to see what's out there for 2000, but in no way, shape or form can this be a good thing in our situation.

J_86 wrote: »

I get that upgrading can be costly and possibly breaking things, but there is no way using Windows 2000 or ancient software is a good business decision. The longer you wait to upgrade, the more painful and costly upgrading is going to be.

Yea our InfoSec manager is trying to force the change, however with our structure business wants, business gets. It's amazing.

Verities wrote: »

Hah! We found one running in our environment earlier this year and were told to power it off instead of decommissioning it. The oldest software we have running right now is Solaris 8.

Yea at this point we all wish we could just power it off rather than have that thing up and running as it is.

techfiend

Are these small or big businesses that have this old software?

First day on the job I saw XP and a majority of software at least a couple years old and thought that was bad upkeep, guess not.

PurpleIT

I have one running Server 2000 with a custom-built app on it (it uses SQL 2000, too). Upgrades are out of the question as we would have to completely redesign/rebuild the program and the last time we tried that we spent $65,000 and ended up with a half-finished program that almost worked, but it would have cost another $100,000+ to finish it. Funding was pulled, etc, etc... but we still need the app.

I actually stood that server up in the first month I was at this job just over 12 years ago. I just gave notice and while the program and its associated server probably won't stay in production for more than a year or so, it will have lasted longer here than me.

It's kinda bittersweet, actually...

MTciscoguy

JoJoCal19 wrote: »

Yea well, my employer has hundreds of thousands if not more peoples' PII of every kind imaginable sitting on our servers, and I haven't even bothered to look on exploit DBs to see what's out there for 2000, but in no way, shape or form can this be a good thing in our situation.

Nobody said it was smart or safe, I simply posted a fact in the business world, it is reality, I have explained more times than I can count why it needs to be upgraded, but until such time as they see the financial benefit to upgrading, it ain't going to happen and if I want to maintain my reputation as well as my pay, I find a way to work with them. Now I do have to say, it is attitudes like yours that allows me to keep working. Thank you.

techfiend

Seems mostly due to licensing costs but how about linux? Has anyone seen a really old linux distro at work? From personal experience it can be quite a risk to update to a new major kernel.

N2IT

SQL Server 2008

MTciscoguy

techfiend wrote: »

Seems mostly due to licensing costs but how about linux? Has anyone seen a really old linux distro at work? From personal experience it can be quite a risk to update to a new major kernel.

I have run into a couple, that must have been first edition distro's and should be in the Smithsonian! I simply explained to them, that we had to upgrade hardware and software, it took about a year of running parallel systems to get them changed over, but it sure made for a good Christmas that year!



I will add, two days ago, I walked into an office and ran into a computer that was hooked up to a very old Oki Data printer that weighed about 2 tons and it was running Windows 98SE..It was a set up that was for printing out line by line pick sheets for a wholesale food service company and they were still printing on greenbar paper, glad I have been playing with computers for so long!

tprice5

N2IT wrote: »

SQL Server 2008

lol I wouldn't consider SQL 08 to be that old.

N2IT

It's the oldest software we have.

I work for a joint venture between two monoliths and our budget is large and our operation is very new so everything we have at the moment is no older than 2 years old except for our SQL Server build and maybe our server OS.

Now the two large companies who manage us are a different story.

msteinhilber

Oldest we directly support, probably the software we use for our proximity cards access control but we managed to make it function on Windows XP and it's completely isolated short of a serial connection to the controller so it's not much of a threat. In the building I recently did a P2V on a Windows 95 box that failed which was used to program the HVAC system, not something we typically support though as the building is owned/managed through a subsidiary.

alan2308

A few of our clients are in finance, and there are some apps that go back at least 15 years, though fortunately most of the data has been migrated to other platforms. But those apps are still a standard part of every workstation build.

A few clients have at least one 2000 Server box running something, and I know of at least one NT4 Server box still going.