Hrm, interesting but I was hoping for a bit more. These are mostly collectors keeping things around for nostalgia purposes. I was hoping to hear more about legitimate systems being run on 20/30/40 year old systems.
Yeah, military and space hardware feels like a given. You could always say the Voyager is the oldest running program.
I'd be more interested to hear about computers that are in use being actively changed, with new software coming out on them to support whatever unique need they have.
That or highly specialized one-trick-ponies that cannot change due to their complex nature.
The military mass producing 100,000 <insert thing> from the 70's with computers on them, or a person maintaining their BBS doesn't really feel the same.
The market is tiny, and mostly hobbyist focused, but there is even the occasional commercial software release, now often targetting AROS and MorphOS (AmigaOS inspired OS's) too. For example:
The Amiga community is interesting because there is a distinct split between different factions, with some insisting on only supporting "classics" (the M68k machines) and sometimes reimplementations (there's a series of FPGA based projects), some only interested in the current generation PPC systems (from AEon and ACube), as well as AROS and MorphOS camps, and those only interested in emulation.
Of course a lot of people couldn't care less about the various splits and just want to get on with things, but this is a community where you will find people actively using anything from 7.16MHz A500's to high end PC's to run OS's that are widely source compatible and that either directly runs or have some level of integrated emulation capability for old M68k apps, and where a lot of the community still run and/or tinker with software that was released back in 1985 (e.g. there are people still tweaking the original roms to cut more cycles off the odd system call...).
Z80 family has been in continuous production since '76 mostly in embedded devices since the 80s. Even today someone's probably writing a new photocopier controller or a thermostat or something for a Z80.
The allen bradley/rockwell 500 series PLCs have been in continuous production since the 90s, lets say the 5/01 has been made from '95 (although probably earlier?) till today as far as I know, so that's 18 continuous years of production. They're pretty simple but sometimes that's all you need.
If you allow a compatible family orientation, the first vax rolled off the assembly line in '77 and the last in '05 so thats a good 28 years of continuous production. Of course thats a trap, I would imagine "PC/XT compatible" boards will be made basically eternally for embedded work, etc.
