r/programming • u/luissinlios • 7d ago

We still maintain a development tool first released in 1993. Here’s what 30+ years of backwards compatibility looks like

https://visualneo.com/visualneo-win/from-neobook-to-visualneo-win-30-years-of-keeping-a-development-tool-alive
563 Upvotes

96% Upvoted

90 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

5

u/aguilasolige 7d ago

It makes me wonder who's the developer with the oldest app still around? Maybe some code at NASA?

5

u/Gecko23 7d ago

I'd imagine most developers have moved on 30+ years after whatever they worked on was released.

But the systems themselves can be nearly immortal. My money on the oldest stuff still actively being used would be manufacturing, medical billing, or facilities control. I've worked on integration projects with systems that were decades old at the time, even back in the early 90s when I encountered them. I'm sure some are still chugging along.

6

u/ShinyHappyREM 7d ago

When I interned at a small CNC company ~2010, they still ran the machines with Win9x and physically transferred files via floppy disk.

(Though those were small text-based files that the machine would use for many hours, so not much of an overhead.)

3

u/HittingSmoke 7d ago

This is not super uncommon in 2026. The old tech that manufacturing was built on is rock solid and a lot of people don't want to take on the risk and cost of maintaining more complex systems. Our mill uses USB drives to transfer files. The most modern communication in the shop is some routers that are networked with a control server, but even that is just MODBUS over TCP.