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charon writes:

When Allan Lasser went looking for the oldest computer used by the U.S. government, he found a surprising candidate: the Voyager probes [muckrock.com].

When I started this project [muckrock.com], 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 [popularmechanics.com] 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?

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