What are the oldest peices of computer programing in use?

marco_polo · 13-07-2007 10:43am

stebishop wrote:

I actually saw an ad looking for COBAL programmers on jobs.ie only last week

Type it in to irishjobs.ie. Loads of positions available.

Capt'n Midnight · 14-07-2007 12:02am

Khannie wrote:

The space shuttles are still using 8086's. I remember hearing that NASA were trying to dig out replacement parts on ebay.

The shuttles use magnetic core memory.
Airbuses use 80186's , not even 286's. One of the problems with complex chips is you can't fully test them. Remember Intel and the pentium divide bug ? Nowhere near as bad as the i386 multiply bug that only happened when the chip got hot, but they got away with that because it was before the interweb.

Look at patents too - the IBM GIF patent expired not too long ago.

Isn't Fortran older than Cobol ?

If you treat totalisers as computers then they were running from 1913 until at least the late 80's.

mechanical tidal prediction machines were running from 1873 and were only replaced in the 1960's
http://www.math.sunysb.edu/~tony/tides/index.html

and there is the Antikythera Mechanism

Newgrange still works

Capt'n Midnight · 14-07-2007 12:28am

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSIRAC - oldest electronic fifth stored program computecomputer that could be got running again, but they have the programs and manuals.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semi_Automatic_Ground_Environment - front line service till 1983, code is probably still in use in SABRE

The AN/FSQ-7 is the largest computer ever built, and will likely hold that record in the future. Each machine used 55,000 vacuum tubes, about ½ acre (2,000 m²) of floor space, weighed 275 tons and used up to three megawatts of power

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z3 - replica running
Babbages Difference_engine is in the science museum and Ada Lovelace did some programming too.

Victor · 14-07-2007 9:43am

Capt'n Midnight wrote:

Newgrange still works

Yeah, but the universe has gone out of sync. I think you might need some bulldozers to add a few leap seconds.

Capt'n Midnight · 14-07-2007 1:45pm

The OPW just haven't applied the patch yet.

mike65 · 14-07-2007 1:57pm

If they do it'll be over-budget and An Taisce will be critical of its aesthetics

Mike

Victor · 14-07-2007 2:00pm

Capt'n Midnight wrote:

The OPW just haven't applied the patch yet.

I'm sure they'll get arounf to it once the find the 5.25 inch drive.

lucernarian · 28-07-2007 8:01pm

Ericsson's AXE telephone exchange equipment could be using programming that's at least 25 years old. I'm pretty sure that the operating systems/firmware involved have essentially stayed the same at its core.

ladybirdirl · 28-07-2007 10:56pm

Almost all the banks & lots of insurance companies have many AS400's, mainframes that run COBOL,JCL etc.

The cost of replacement is ENORMOUS and architects can't usually make up their mind what to replace it with;)

Also mant of the big enterprise & shiooing systems like BPCS & JDE started life in AS400 land

Having said that - my first job was an AS400 RPG programmer( and I'm not that old

) & I travelled the world with it!!!

All this C & Jave & ASP.net is for wimps I reckon

Ladybird

8k2q1gfcz9s5d4 · 30-07-2007 4:34pm

seamus wrote:

But...but...in the movies they just write viruses, and they like infect everything, mobile phones, watches, alien spacecraft, small dogs. Computer viruses are, like, super, right?

being watching a bit too much die hard 4!!!!

aidan_walsh · 30-07-2007 4:36pm

Jayce Proud Mandrake wrote:

being watching a bit too much die hard 4!!!!

Pff, Die Hard 4 was positively realistic compared to some others (Independence Day, anyone).

seamus · 30-07-2007 4:55pm

I never thought I'd get a chance to post this

Civilian_Target · 30-07-2007 5:58pm

I know COBOL and FORTAN and I'm 23!

AFAIK, Space Shuttles have been updated and don't use magenetic core memory anymore, but some of the older ones do still use 8086's from way-back-when.

The oldest bit of code in the world might well be Quicksort which was written by C.A.R. Hoare in 1961, updated to cope with threading in 1974 (Hoare invented the concept of monitors and tried his own algorithm on them) and pretty much hasn't changed since (except to be rewritten in different languages).

Talisman · 31-07-2007 11:27am

Capt'n Midnight wrote:

Newgrange still works

The reason it still works is because it was rebuilt in the 1960s.

democrates · 03-08-2007 6:35pm

I'd guess aging Russian military hardware would be up there, missile guidance or something. Maybe that fails the "still in use" criterion.

In the 1980's they had a pdp clone with a telephone billing system hand written in assembly (jrnz) :eek:. There's an old Russian saying - "when you're poor you have to think".

AlmightyCushion · 03-08-2007 10:49pm

aidan_walsh wrote:

Pff, Die Hard 4 was positively realistic compared to some others (Independence Day, anyone).

The core especially the scene where the super geek guy gave someone free long distance calls for live. Fúck me I nearly exploded.

Capt'n Midnight · 03-08-2007 11:41pm

There is a fairly old system that's been in use for ages. It generally uses RAID 1 and despite many hardware updates the keywords haven't changed much, you can usually get the code running on different systems if you try. It doesn't use flow control much relying on multiple simultaneous processing of the code, but the program controls the environment which controls the speed of processing so it's not quite the free for all you would expect.

Nucleic Acid programming is still in use today after several billion years.

dingding · 03-08-2007 11:59pm

democrates wrote:

I'd guess aging Russian military hardware would be up there, missile guidance or something. Maybe that fails the "still in use" criterion.

In the 1980's they had a pdp clone with a telephone billing system hand written in assembly (jrnz) :eek:. There's an old Russian saying - "when you're poor you have to think".

REminds me of the story of the americans who spent millions developing a biro that would work in zero gravity, the russians used pencils

Also when I was in NASA a couple of years ago, they space shuttle uses the original control panel from the 70's, they don't plan to update the controls for a couple of years.

AlmightyCushion · 04-08-2007 12:06am

dingding wrote:

REminds me of the story of the americans who spent millions developing a biro that would work in zero gravity, the russians used pencils

I remeber that all right. Very funny.

aidan_walsh · 04-08-2007 3:37am

AlmightyCushion wrote:

I remeber that all right. Very funny.

Ooh, sorry folks...

AlmightyCushion · 04-08-2007 3:44am

aidan_walsh wrote:

Ooh, sorry folks...

Wow I thought that was true for so long.

democrates · 05-08-2007 12:31am

aidan_walsh wrote:

Ooh, sorry folks...

article wrote:

[FONT=Trebuchet MS,Bookman Old Style,Arial]In addition, both the lead and the wood of the pencil could burn rapidly in the pure oxygen atmosphere.[/FONT]

A pure Oxygen atmosphere? ... Poor pencils.

blackgold>> · 09-08-2007 9:06am

Assembly was there when the first computers where built and is still used today so i think it's safe to say thats the answer to your question.

Thomas_S_Hunterson · 09-08-2007 9:13am

blackgold>> wrote:

Assembly was there when the first computers where built and is still used today so i think it's safe to say thats the answer to your question.

Ah ha but machine code pre-dates even that:D

blackgold>> · 09-08-2007 9:16am

Thats obvious.
Thats not what he asked.

seamus · 09-08-2007 9:36am

I think the spirit of the question was referring to stuff that's still in wide-scale commercial use. Assembly is still used in some small capacities at the uber-scale of computer programming - writing drivers and OS kernels. No-one in their right mind writes modern applications in Assembly.

blackgold>> · 09-08-2007 9:50am

You wouldn't be reading this now without a bios now would you :rolleyes:
It has it's uses like all other languages.

    invoke SendMessage, hWndMCI,WM_CLOSE,NULL,NULL

Thats how easy assembler under windows is these days.

Duckjob · 09-08-2007 10:00am

seamus wrote:

But...but...in the movies they just write viruses, and they like infect everything, mobile phones, watches, alien spacecraft, small dogs. Computer viruses are, like, super, right?

Yes, the reason those viruii can infect anything is because they come with cool spinny vector graphics !

seamus · 09-08-2007 10:16am

Bah, that's not assembly. You have more than 2 arguments. And more than three letters in your function.

Even BIOS coding, I wouldn't call "commerical programming".

blackgold>> · 09-08-2007 10:22am

Ok for arguments sake we will call it assembler.
But thats how easy it is to program using the windows api.

Ok so what about your graphics card drivers?
Video games use inline assembly optimizations with their c code etc.
You would be suprised !

I know your trying to prove your point by saying assebly is like so

mov eax,9
push eax
pop ebx

etc etc

but when your programing under an operating system you do use it's naitive api do you not?

push 0
push waitmsgtitle
push waitmsg
push MB_OK
call [MessageBoxA]

its that easy.
the c version looks no easier (or harder).

What are the oldest peices of computer programing in use?

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