Inspired by this thread.
https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-the-oldest-piece-of-media-you-engage-with/983224
Mine is a 2008 Chumby. It still works fine as an alarm clock. Some of the audio streaming stuff doesn’t work anymore but some does. I hadn’t listened to Pandora in ages but it still works. I listen to WABC radio station every morning for my daily dose of right wing nutjobbery.
I have a 4th Gen Classic iPod I still use. Introduced in 2004. Replaced the battery a few times. The last time I also put in a 32Gig solid state drive. The charge lasts a lot longer.
I just checked my file server. It still has a 3.5" floppy drive in it. I probably last used it almost 3 years ago when sorting thru stuff for a move to see what was on some old floppies. The date is anyone’s guess. I’m not taking it out to get a mfr date. (Yeah, the MB, etc. is oldish, too. But not as old as the floppy drive. I think the CPU only goes back to 2011.)
I’ve got a slipstick around somewhere . . .
I have two working Macintosh SEs with System 6.0.8 on them a foot and a half to my right. One of them is on my LAN and I can Timbuktu into it from my Power Mac 7100 which runs MacOS 8.6 and also sits within easy reach. Got a pair of ‘WallStreet’ PowerBooks with Panther (10.3) and a PowerBook G4 running Tiger (10.4) and another I use as a FileMaker Server box running Leopard (10.5).
In the closet I have a SCSI SyQuest 200 drive and some cartridges for it.
Oh, and I’m typing this on an Apple ‘Saratoga’ ADB Extended Keyboard II, attached to modern computer with an iMate.
I have some really old lamps.
Oh, computer technology. Hmm.
I occasionally drive a 1990 Mercedes that has computer controlled fuel injection. Does that count?
I have a HP desktop from 2010 with a double core AMD processor (don’t remember the clock rate) and only 4 GB of RAM as my file server, mostly for music and movies, running Windows 10 at least. Lately, the monitor that’s as old crapped out, but that’s not much of a problem because I can remote control it with my laptop. It’s a bit slow, but it still serves its purpose.
A 2010 iPad that still works pretty well. I only use it for a GPS occasionally, and it’s not loaded up with documents, photos and apps, so it still runs reasonably fast.
A Sony smart TV from circa 2010 that runs the obsolete and no longer supported Google TV platform. It runs the Android OS and you could install apps on it back when Google still supported it. But since most of the apps on it no longer work and are no longer being updated, it just serves as a screen for watching things on my Roku now.
I use lots of old stuff. My oldest computer is a Tandy WP-2 from 1989, which is still a very usable tablet-factor word processor. Some writers still use them because they have a full sized, full travel keyboard in a tablet form factor.
Does the x86 instruction set count? I mean directly working with it, not just using a computer running x86.
Just about every work day I change a byte in memory from 0xcc to 0x90. That changes an instruction from an INT 3 (debug breakpoint) to a NOP (actually an XCHG AX, AX, which does nothing).
These instructions have the exact same encoding as they did in 1978 (making them as old as me).
I still use the calculator I bought in 1984. It’s a Casio FX-451.
I have an East German sextant and circular slide rule, although to say that I ‘interact with’ it regularly would be a stretch. I do have an HP-48G that I use routinely that is circa 1995, and somewhere I still have an HP-28S that I purchased in 1988 although the battery hatch has been broken and repaired so many times it is nearly impossible to keep the batteries in it.
If we’re extending “computer technology” to include code, I have some ‘Seventies and ‘Eighties era Fortran-77-based codes that we still use, and NASTRAN and every structural finite element code built on it still has roots in the ‘Sixties.
Stranger
Luxury. I do all my programming in ladder logic.
As for old hardware, I’ll bet there are tons of old HP Laserjets still out there working. Those things were unkillable. I had a Laserjet 4 that I purchased in 1992 that I finally got rid of just a couple of years ago. During that time I probably went through a dozen other printers, but that HP just worked. It never even needed service. Just toner changes. Laserjet II’s were even tougher.
I’ve done my fair share of ladder logic programming and x86 assembly. I wouldn’t rate one above the other.
1978 Northstar Horizon.
1979 TRS-80. From before it would have been called “Model I”, because it was the only model.
1982 blue case (second model) Osborne 1.
1983 Morrow Micro Decision 2.
PLC still has a lot of applications. It is shocking how much modern industrial and electrical infrastructure still runs on ‘Seventies era code, and even a badly written PLC algorithm is still pretty traceable compared to spaghetti Fortran or any kind of assembler code.
Stranger
Ladder Logic was old
I was joking, because ladder logic is old. Created in 1968, and still in use. I haven’t looked at it in probably 20 years.
“…a perfect blend of a shrunken instrument panel of a DC-3 and a World War II radio…”
Stranger
With any degree of regularity (several times a week), it’s most likely my TI-68 from 1989, which sits at my desk at home. I happen to collect old calculators and I’ve got some from the 1970s that I interact with only occasionally (once every few months) so I won’t count those.
Someone upthread mentioned slide rules and I’ve got quite a few of those. Again, I don’t play around with any given one more than a few times a year. My oldest one is from the 1920s.
ETA: Limiting it to items I bought contemporaneously and still use today, I guess the closest would be my TI-30Xa, which I bought with saved money in middle school in 1997. Don’t use that very often but it’s the oldest piece of technology that I have that I bought. The next closest item would be my old Acer laptop which I bought in 2009 or so. It came with Windows Vista and was replaced with a Lenovo ThinkPad I bought in 2019. I still have it and did fire it up just a couple weeks ago to get some old files off of it.