back to article Eighteen year old server trumped by functional 486 fleet!

Last week we brought you news of a server decommissioned after eighteen years and ten months of continuous operation. Readers have since suggested to us that the machine was a mere infant. “Randy” wrote to tell us he's familiar with a site where over 150 Digital Equipment Corporation Adec400xP Application Servers have been …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    WTF?

    Get the consultants in!!!!!!!!!!!!one

    “Sam”, told us that in 1985 he built an employee retirement plan app around a Lotus 123 spreadsheet running on an IBM PC-XT.

    “Much later, in 2005, I got a call from an old coworker, now CIO of the company,” The call was to let him know that the PC was about to be retired.

    “The same PC-XT and dot matrix printer had been calculating and printing retirement account statements for 20 years! And it was actually still working flawlessly,” Sam says. “The CIO said they never saw a need to replace it because it was fast and accurate.”

    Only outsourcing to a financial services company brought about the box's demise.

    ????Eh????

    Well that sounds sure to save them a few bob -------------------------->

  2. akeane

    And stores receipes...

    >

    Reader “Elmer” wrote to say he's run a DR-DOS-powered Pentium-120 since late 1996. “This machine serves as a database for my phone numbers and dials them using a Bluetooth interface to my cellphone,” Elmer said in his polite e-mail. “It also keeps financial records.”

    Elmer says the box “Works fine for the tasks it focuses on.”

    <

    I was fortunate enough to get a job for my "sandwich" year (1997) at uni working for the DR-DOS guys!

    Wotta a time, Digitiser was still on teletext, I used to get in at 6 a.m. to play QuakeWorld on the 128k ISDN, ZIP drives, Dungeon Keeper, F1GP2 (cracked so I could play it on my Acer 355 laptop without a CD being present), and mucking about adding long name file support and running the OS boot through Soft-Ice to figure out how to support 2GB disks...

    Moc-a-moc!

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: And stores receipes...

      "This machine serves as a database for my phone numbers and dials them using a Bluetooth interface to my cellphone"

      Yep, I definitely can't think of a simpler solution to that particular problem...

      1. Pookietoo

        Re: can't think of a simpler solution

        There may be situations in which that is an optimal solution, as well as those where saying "Phone, call Bob" is better.

      2. jonathanb Silver badge

        Re: And stores receipes...

        Don't see any problem, as long as your phone is always within Bluetooth range of this machine.

    2. jpmorris

      Re: And stores receipes...

      "I was fortunate enough to get a job for my "sandwich" year (1997) at uni working for the DR-DOS guys!"

      Nearly fell off my chair reading that, since I was the other placement student. Good to see you're alive and well.

      The other big project at the time was DR-Webspyder, the DOS web browser. You may have deliberately forgotten that, in which case I apologise for reminding you.

      I think my proudest moment working on DR-DOS was fixing the CDROM driver (NWCDEX) that prevented System Shock from starting.

      Fun times, and a real shame they imploded, turned into SCO and went mental. In a way they were ahead of the curve, in that they did the whole dot-com crash type thing years before it was fashionable...

      Another fun thing was that the main server was a Netware box (the company all being ex-Netware). It was running 4.1 I think, and every so often it would just die with the error 'Multiple Abends'.

      1. Runilwzlb

        Re: And stores receipes...

        Just seeing the words "DR DOS" brought tears of nostalgia to my eyes. It was everything a computer user could want. For all our 'advancement', its been downhill ever since. It would be wonderful if we had a modernized version for today’s users. Linux is close, but DOS is easier.

        Back then, computers 'did' things. Today, we use machines a thousand times more powerful...so that we can pop virtual bubbles, play Fruit Ninja, and afflict the world with an inexhaustible supply of Kardashian/Jenner photos.

  3. Philip Storry

    >

    “Igor” told us about a pair of IBM e x235 servers that have run since 1997, each packing four Pentium III CPUs, 4GB of RAM and eight 72GB Seagate SCSI HDDs.

    <

    Nope. The Pentium III wasn't released until 1999, so he must mean a Pentium II or has his dates wrong.

    The amount of RAM is also a little luxurious for 1997, when the average PC had 16Mb and the average server had 32-64Mb. Not necessarily impossible, but dubious. I'd expect 1Gb of RAM tops in an x86 based machine in 1997.

    And 72Gb hard disks in 1997? Not that I recall. Not even with SCSI bypassing the ATA limit of 512Mb. Maybe in pixie-la-la-land, but not on any site I worked at. The standard size around then was around the 400Mb region for a desktop, and servers might stretch to 2Gb per disk - but you were more likely to see an array of 1Gb disks.

    Everything about Igor's story seems suspect. Those specifications are just too early. I respectfully submit that he's misremembered, and apologise to him for being the one to have to point it out.

    1. GitMeMyShootinIrons

      I used to do quite a bit of work on NetFintiy and System X back in the day. If I remember right, late 90's/early 2000's would have been IBM NetFinity boxes with PII and PIII Xeons. In fact a quick Google found this amusing piece from El Reg - http://www.theregister.co.uk/1999/11/04/ibm_ups_pc_server_price/

      The x235 was around 2003 (http://www-01.ibm.com/common/ssi/rep_ca/9/897/ENUS103-039/). For it's time, a beefy little tower that could certainly support the specs mentioned, though it's likely a P4 Xeon.

      A few wires crossed methinks. Happens to me all the time. I blame senility and overdoing the coffee.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Agreed. The P3 was not released until 98-99, additionally 73GB HDD's were early 2000's..

    3. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      <pedant on>

      GB not Gb, totally different measurement!

      <pedant off>

    4. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      You are definitely misremembering HD specs of that era.

      The 512MB barrier had long been crossed by 1997; that era was time of the 8.4GB limit.

      A consumer PC (just a desktop, not a fancy server) my family bought in the tail end of 1997 featured a 3.2GB hard drive, and if I recall correctly, 4GB was an option.

      That PC had 32MB RAM standard, for what it's worth.

      1. chivo243 Silver badge

        scavenger

        In 1999 I was pinching RAM out of dying to dead machines to prop up the living. 64MB was living large then. They had a Celeron processor.

      2. Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

        "that era was time of the 8.4GB limit"

        Imposed by a BIOS INT13 interface limit, not by disks, and it had to be amended with BIOS INT13 extensions.

        SCSI-2 protocol has a 2TB hard limit. Nothing before that.

    5. RainbowTrout

      In the mid 90's we were using 4GB SCSI's on our SGI workstations (in external enclosures) and may have had at most 25-30GB of total disk space (which at that time seemed more than enough storage space). The biggest issue was the weekly backups (on a single DAT drive running over 4 to 6 tapes with swapping) took so long it was time for the next one before the last one finished.......

    6. chivo243 Silver badge

      Effin Coincidence it is..

      I worked for a Video Studio that was trying the waters of digital editing, back in the mid 1990's and just today I was trying to remember what size drive, yes one drive they were trying to use, (I wasn't a tech guy then, but a film editor) here was the latest and greatest then:

      1992: Seagate is first to market with a 7200-revolutions-per-minute hard drive, the 2.1GB Barracuda.

      http://www.pcworld.com/article/127105/article.html

    7. Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

      "72Gb hard disks in 1997? Not that I recall."

      Indeed. 9.1 GB SCSI disks had just hit the streets. Noisy beasts with 1.6" thickness. Price-wise they were quite, but not entirely unlike a brick of gold.

      For a reference point, I have a working Netfinity 5500 in my shed, built in early 1998. Hasn't been running all the time, so it doesn't qualify for the pissing contest.

      2x Pentium II 400 MHz in Slot-1 cartridge format.

      4 slots for PC-100 ECC SDRAM, taking either 128 MB or 256 MB sticks. Was quite heartwarming to know that you could sell your car for a whopping 1 GB of memory.

      40 MB/s RAID controller on the motherboard.

      6 hot-swap SCSI disk slots with 3.5" width and 1" height (those 9.1 GB Seagates with 1.6" height took away two slots). 70GB DLT tape drive.

      In 1998, a fully loaded 5500 had a street price of 25000 pounds or thereabouts. Woot.

    8. HWwiz

      Agreed. Even Compaq ProLiant's from 2000 came out with 9.1GB SCSI disks.

      1. dmacleo

        ml350g1 I had built in nov/dec 1999 (came with NT) had the 18GB seagate scsi ultra 60 drives.

        ran that (used 146GB drives) until 2008 running server 2003R2

  4. Shadow Systems

    Bah! MegaHertz are for chumps!

    A one hertz CPU, one kilobyte of RAM, & a 5.25" low density floppy drive is enough to run this fresh copy of Windows 10 that Microsoft insists I download over my 300baud accoustic coupler style, joystick port connected modem, right?

    </SarcasticTwit>

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Windows

      Re: Bah! MegaHertz are for chumps!

      Well, 640kB is enough for anyone.

      -- Billy G III

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Bah! MegaHertz are for chumps!

      My current CPU seems to run at one Hertz per megasecond.

      1. Stoneshop
        Headmaster

        Re: Bah! MegaHertz are for chumps!

        One cycle per second per megasecond?

      2. Anthony Hegedus Silver badge

        Re: Bah! MegaHertz are for chumps!

        I think mean mean 1 microhertz?

      3. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Bah! MegaHertz are for chumps!

        My current CPU seems to run at one Hertz per megasecond.

        So your CPU is slowing down by 1mHz per second (= 0.001 cycles per second, per second)?

        1. PNGuinn
          Headmaster

          Re: Bah! MegaHertz are for chumps!

          "So your CPU is slowing down by 1mHz per second (= 0.001 cycles per second, per second)?"

          Wouldn't that mean "My current CPU seems to run at minus one Hertz per megasecond."?

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    I guarantee you that banks and a few big enterprises have much older stuff still running just because of the risk associated with turning it off.

    Unfortunately their staff are probably too NDA'ed to tell us.

    I wonder how much COBOL code will still be running when the last person who speaks the language passes on.

    1. Rob Moss

      John Lewis are still hiring COBOL developers.

      1. MAH

        Ahh cobol...the only other instance where a missing period causes so much anxiety and grief

        1. HWwiz

          Quote of the week.

        2. Michael Wojcik Silver badge

          Ahh cobol...the only other instance where a missing period causes so much anxiety and grief

          At least with COBOL you can use ANSI (COBOL-85) scope terminators, and turn on compiler diagnostics for implicit end-of-scope. That doesn't seem to work with the other sort of period.

    2. Evil Auditor Silver badge

      The COBOL code here is still running and probably will keep doing so for years to come. But for the last 4 or 5 years it's been running in a virtual machine on Intel x86 hardware.

      1. GrumpyOldMan

        I seem to remember that at the Milleniumumum that the retired Cobol and Fortran boys made an absolute fortune in support contracts!

    3. Naselus

      "I guarantee you that banks and a few big enterprises have much older stuff still running just because of the risk associated with turning it off."

      Yeah, their security stuff is definitely even older...

      1. Dave 126

        >Unfortunately their staff are probably too NDA'ed to tell us.

        Specific details yeah, but not completely NDA'd... BBC Radio 4 had a 15 minute documentary last year about the ancient code that banks run.

    4. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      have an upvote and an anonymous "no comment" ;-)

    5. Fihart

      CP/M lives ?

      Friend working for one of the NatWest subsidiaries told me that their entire system went down after some bright spark changed something minor like a logging file that managed to exceed CP/M's capacity to address memory.

      I was astonished that they had anything CPM still running in the 1990s but apparently no one still working there had any idea how to replace the machine in question. So it remained central to their IT system.

      I recalled then that the first word processing prog I used in 1985 was Superwriter by CA and it had been created for CP/M so, even ported to DOS, it could not deal with documents over a certain length.

    6. Michael Wojcik Silver badge

      I wonder how much COBOL code will still be running when the last person who speaks the language passes on.

      There are still a number of universities teaching COBOL, and it's not too difficult to pick up on one's own. As long as there's a market, someone will fill it.

      There is definitely still a lot of COBOL from the 1980s and a fair bit from the 1970s running among our customer base.

      Old code is easier to find than old hardware. I know of several significantl pieces of C I wrote in the '80s that are still in production use. And of course OSes tend to keep some of their code alive for a very long time, on the "if it ain't broke" principle. I imagine there are discernible bits of OS/360 still in zOS.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        OS/360 no

        OS/370 yes

        OS/360 was fundamentally a non-interactive batch-only system and only hade timesharing/preemtive multitasking glued on (TSO, MFT/MVT). It didn't have virtual memory.

        OS/370 was what became the foundation of MVS and later OS/390 and z/OS. It still has TSO looking pretty much the same when interacting with it, but it's now just a command shell.

        The source code of both can be found online - I have actually built OS/360 with HASP and TSO from source. Fun times!

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Bah. OS/370 was OS/360 with a few of the more annoying bugs fixed and virtual memory superimposed on the remains. Uptime was measured in HOURS.

          Still, OS/360 MFT put men on the moon. MTBF on a 1 MIPS (360/75) processor was ~20 hrs, so a few software hacks were needed so that computer coverage for entire missions could be ensured.

          1. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            LOL - yeah right

  6. wolfetone Silver badge

    Prez and his music machine

    Reminds me of that scene in the latter Only Fools And Horses episodes when Trigger is there with his broom saying he's had the same brush for 15 years, but has replaced the stick 8 times and the head 6 times.

    1. Michael Wojcik Silver badge

      Re: Prez and his music machine

      As was pointed out in the comments to the article that inspired this one, that's the Ship of Theseus problem in ontology, though the one you cite is closer in spirit to the "Grandfather's Axe" variant.

      It's one of the best-known philosophical problems. In Japan, it's often associated with Kinkaku-Ji, a historic temple ("the temple of the golden pavillion"), all of which has at one time or another burned and been rebuilt.

      David Wong does an amusing version of it in the preface to John Dies at the End.

  7. chrullrich

    "The server is an HP Netserver LX with dual 200MHz Pentium Pros, 128MB of RAM, runs Windows NT 4.1"

    That last alone, of course, makes it unique, hence unsurpassable, in the world.

    1. MyffyW Silver badge

      Methinks perhaps they meant NT 3.1, or NT 4

      ... or maybe they've developed their own fork of the NT product?

  8. TeeCee Gold badge
    Alert

    How old?

    Once upon a time, an engineer on site told me of a legal firm in Kent. They'd just been told that it would no longer be possible to provide software updates or changes for their aging box, which was still adequate for their purposes.

    The machine which "knitted" core[1] ROMs had finally given up the ghost in a terminal and permanent fashion. This was in the late '90s.........

    [1] Yes that is core memory, made with actual cores!

    1. Known Hero
      Happy

      Re: How old?

      You're going to have to explain that one to the under 30's !!!

      1. imanidiot Silver badge

        Re: How old?

        I might be sub 30s (just), but I know damn well what core memory is, thankyouverymuchyouoldcodger.

        1. wolfetone Silver badge

          Re: How old?

          "I might be sub 30s (just), but I know damn well what core memory is, thankyouverymuchyouoldcodger."

          I'm also sub 30's, and I find the problem with the over 30's is that they haven't heard of a thing called "Google" which allows us to find out what core memory is.

          1. Known Hero

            Re: How old?

            The explanations here tend to be quite informative, also, when somebody does run a search of "core memory", wouldn't it be nice to see the reg come up with the explanation and a following argument over semantics.

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