I have a serial Wacom tablet here that I still use via an RS-232 PCI card. It’s not as if they wear out.
The other very old piece of technology I use is a Canopus DV Rex RT board set from 1999. It was a PCI hardware board board from back when computers weren’t fast enough to handle standard definition video. Now I have a computer that handles multiple streams of HD video, but I still have this one because nothing else touches it for SD video capture and it is connected to a calibrated Sony broadcast monitor. It works perfectly for the material stored on that computer.
Sort of off-topic, but I discovered a very old piece of software that may set some sort of record for still working.
Back in 1993, Todd Rundgren released the first interactive music CD, called No World Order. It was released on the Philips CDi platform, and allowed the listener to control various parameters of the music playback - mood, mix, tempo, form - and to select programs of the material by different producers, Jerry Harrison, Don Was, Hal Wilner and Bob Clearmountian. It was also released on Mac and Windows.
On a goof, I stuck this CD-ROM in my Windows 7 machine. It played perfectly! I would expect a text editor from 1993 to work, but an 18 year old piece of audio-video software? I mean, I know of 2 year old software that is dependent on a specific version of .Net or release of Java that will not work on a new computer.
Not to quibble too much, but AFAIK the Apple Extended boards use discrete* ALPS switches which don’t have a buckling spring. The Model M buckling spring boards have a discrete hammer/spring mechanism for each key (which provides the audible and tactile feedback) combined with a large rubber dome mat / PCB setup to provide the real electrical switching for all the key positions where the ALPS switches have springs to give pressure to the keys plus some curved metal leaves that provide switching and feedback.
I mean discrete as in, for each key the whole switching mechanism is in a single package that can be replaced key-for-key. The Model M boards don’t really have that.
You can mostly thank Microsoft’s emphasis (sometimes overemphasis) on backwards compatibility for that. With the .NET Framework they’ve always been pretty comfortable with letting developers create software that will require updated versions of the framework be installed in order to run. However with Win16 applications (which No World Order probably is) all the way back when Microsoft released Win 95 with the Win32 API they were very careful to make sure that Win16 applications could still run in a Win32 environment. That’s more or less continued up to the present day, the only exceptions I believe are 64-Bit versions of Windows can’t run old Win16 applications.
While many developers have complained about the move to Windows 95 or Windows XP “breaking” their software, in truth Microsoft has been almost slavish to trying to make each new OS release as backwards compatible as possible. So much so that I’ve read some compelling articles that suggest Microsoft’s products across the board (not just their OSes, but their Office Suite and web browser) would be better off if Microsoft was more willing to just push out new versions that broke really old shit that people shouldn’t be using anymore.