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When Allan Lasser went looking for the oldest computer used by the U.S. government, he found a surprising candidate: the Voyager probes.
When I started this project, I hadn't even considered that the oldest active computer might not even be on Earth. But after my first post, I received a few tips encouraging me to look at the computers onboard Voyager.
Benjamin Levy pointed out how, "the actual computers on board are probably older than [1977] because it takes time to design and build space probes and to certify their computers for their mission," and another tipster sent me a link to a story about the Voyager team needing to hire a new programmer with experience in FORTRAN.
I'll admit I was reluctant to pursue these computers at first, but I soon realized that it was silly to disqualify a government computer from this hunt simply because it's billions of miles away. While the hardware hasn't been upgraded since it left Earth, the software has been upgraded and maintained to meet new mission requirements. We're still in touch with these probes and they're still performing science at the edge of our solar system. Most important, these are government computers and they are both old and active.
How much computer infrastructure of today will be operable, let alone reliable in 40 years?
(Score: 5, Informative) by butthurt on Sunday January 08 2017, @03:50PM
> [...] modern commodity software that would run on a computer from 1987?
FreeDOS should run on all PC hardware, even the IBM PC-XT and systems with as little as 640k memory.
-- http://wiki.freedos.org/wiki/index.php/Hardware_compatibility [freedos.org]
NetBSD/sun2 is the port of NetBSD to the Sun Microsystems sun2 series of computers, which are based on the Motorola 68010 CPU with a Sun-designed custom MMU. Sun sold these computers as both servers and desktop workstations from the early to mid 1980's.
-- https://wiki.netbsd.org/ports/sun2/ [netbsd.org]
Development activity on NetBSD/vax continues at a speed depending of people's spare time. NetBSD runs on most of the common desktop systems and also on some of the more unusual older systems such as the large-scale 11/780 and 8600.
-- https://wiki.netbsd.org/ports/vax/ [netbsd.org]
The VAX-11/780 family is Digital's oldest VAX product, it was initially announced in 1977.
-- https://wiki.netbsd.org/ports/vax-models/#star [netbsd.org]
NetBSD/i386 requires at least a '486.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 08 2017, @10:38PM
ELKS, the Embeddable Linux Kernel Subset [github.com]
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]