I used the term application and not app to show that i really mean old software.

I'm asking because in the "Is the original OneNote desktop app doomed?" thread the question about perpetual licenses vs subscription licenses came up again.

So what are the apps you use already for a long time without upgrading?

On Windows i have

- A 16bit Windows Application "Forte Agent" from 1999. (yes an 18 year old Internet client without updates).
- The screenshoot utility "SnagIt", from 2002.
- The screen recoding utility "Camtasia" from around 2005 (same company as SnagIt)
- Adobe Fireworks 8 from 2005
- MSOffice 2007

I think every well working outliner or writing tool could age upto 25 years now if the Operating System would allow it.

KeyNote, from 2000-2006 - it is still great!

And yes, SnagIt... as well as WinRAR, Total Commander, Composer...

Best,
Wojciech

- "no ribbon" Office XP 2002
- Visual Studio 6, 1998
- Ecco 4.0 (for archived stuff), 1997

Pierre
IQ Designer

Lotus WordPro; Still installed on my Windows 8 desktop, then survived the upgrade to 10 on same computer. Main reason for using WordPro are all the templates I have in it for flyers. Still works, still prints, and don't see the need to spend the hours it would take to replicate those flyers in something else.

AskSam; the last version - 7. Installed it on my Microsoft Surface Pro 4 just last week. Wanted to search 700+ little text files. Worked it's magic.

Steve

Blackwell Idealist version 3 from 1995.

Has been installed on every subsequent version of Windows, has never crashed, never suffered data loss, in constant daily use . . . and NEVER attempts to connect to the internet thingy.

Office 2003 on my Windows machines at home.
And Brainstorm (always installed, even on my Mac, used occasionally).

On my office Windows machine I have Info Select 8, Brainstorm, AskSam 6 installed, but do not use any of them, except Brainstorm occasionally.

I use Adobe Creative Suite from 2009 regularly.

Steve Z.

Lothar Scholz wrote:

So what are the apps you use already for a long time without upgrading?

Great question. Brainstorm, and the original Audible Manager which probably dates around the early 00s, before Audible was purchased by Amazon.

I too am still using Idealist 3 (though in my case it is the final iteration of that version from Bekon rather than Blackwell). It has worked flawlessly on every version of Windows from Windows for Workgroups through to the 64-bit version of Windows 10. I must confess that I have occasionally managed to lose information in Idealist, but only when Windows itself has crashed while Idealist was open (and only material I had added to the database during that session). It is now beginning to show its age in that the installation file doesn't work in a 64-bit environment so it has to be installed manually, and some of the program settings can no longer be changed via the program interface (though it is still possible to change them by manually editing the settings file). And of course it is plain text only. But for anyone who wants a blisteringly fast and extremely robust text-oriented database Idealist still does the job.

Yours
Lawrence

3 of you mention Brainstorm. I'm not familiar with it. Is it a mindmapping tool? What was/is so great about it? A Google just turned up generic 'brainstorm' references.

Andy Brice wrote:

3 of you mention Brainstorm. I'm not familiar with it. Is it a
mindmapping tool? What was/is so great about it? A Google just turned up
generic 'brainstorm' references.

It's this one:

http://www.brainstormsw.com/index.html

If you search the forum, you'll find several threads on it. WorkFlowy has made it redundant for me, as the key attraction for me was the ability to zoom into an outline item. But it's a very idiosyncratic piece of software, it can do plenty of things still that WorkFlowy can't do.

Just to add a little more detail, Brainstorm was originally developed for DOS. The original programmers updated it to Windows and kept improving it until about ten years ago, then transferred ownership to Oliver, who had high ambitions for the app, but has never been able to do anything with it, so it has languished.

Dr Andus wrote:

Andy Brice wrote:
3 of you mention Brainstorm. I'm not familiar with it. Is it a
>mindmapping tool? What was/is so great about it? A Google just turned
up
>generic 'brainstorm' references.

It's this one:

http://www.brainstormsw.com/index.html

If you search the forum, you'll find several threads on it. WorkFlowy
has made it redundant for me, as the key attraction for me was the
ability to zoom into an outline item. But it's a very idiosyncratic
piece of software, it can do plenty of things still that WorkFlowy can't
do.

Thanks!

I notice that the OP's post and all the responses so far refer to Windows applications. I suppose that there may be at least one reason for that: with Apple's operating systems upgrades now one-yearly, it may be difficult if not impossible to continue to upgrade OSX without upgrading the applications that run on it. I believe in fact that 2019 will be terminal for some: the next OSX upgrade in September will no longer support 32-bit applications.

In terms of applications rather than upgrades, my oldest now goes back to 2007 when I switched from Windows, and is Scrivener, unless you also count MS Office which I used on Windows and now use on the Mac. I used to support some other older "carry-over" Windows applications on my Mac via Parallels (including Brainstorm), but the benefits ceased to compensate for the efforts of doing so, and I stopped.

Hugh wrote:

with Apple's operating systems upgrades now one-yearly, it may
be difficult if not impossible to continue to upgrade OSX without
upgrading the applications that run on it.

Apple like to periodically nuke their entire developer/application ecosystem from orbit. With Hyper Plan I am able to support back to Windows XP ~16 years old) and macOS 10.8 (~5 years old).

--
Andy Brice
http://www.hyperplan.com

I’ve been using the Kedit text editor from Mansfield Software Group on a daily basis since 1985. Kedit is based on the IBM mainframe Xedit and is line-oriented (most text editors are buffer-oriented) which gives it database-like selective editing capabilities that other text editors simply can’t match.

As an aside, while I prefer more standard editors like EditPad Pro or Word for general writing purposes, John McPhee has used Kedit exclusively to write all of his books for nearly 30 years, as he discusses at length in “Draft No. 4,” which many in this forum would probably find worthwhile reading.

I’ve also used Quicken and TurboTax regularly since the early 1990’s, and Beyond Compare on a daily basis since 1998.

I have had Ecco Pro installed on every computer I have used since the mid nineties. I recently purchased an additional laptop and chose not to install Ecco. The reasons? InfoQube is far superior in every way that matters to me. Also, it imports Ecco files (not perfectly but I have the data in very usable form) which obviates the need to keep Ecco for archival purposes.

Jon

Pierre Paul Landry wrote:

- Ecco 4.0 (for archived stuff), 1997

Pierre
IQ Designer

xtabber wrote:

...
As an aside, while I prefer more standard editors like EditPad Pro or
Word for general writing purposes, John McPhee has used Kedit
exclusively to write all of his books for nearly 30 years, as he
discusses at length in “Draft No. 4,” which many in this
forum would probably find worthwhile reading.

Thanks for the hint. After reading the reviews on Amazon, I immediately ordered the book.

FWIW: The oldest piece of software (apart from the antiques inside Windows and Paint etc.) is an old version ThumbsPlus from 2005. That's an image viewer and simple editor I use for batch-editing/converting and for cropping image files. I have used it since 1995. I do no longer know the keystrokes I use - my fingers do.

Beyond Compare

That is a great piece of software that I also use a lot. I interviewed one of the developers some years back:
https://successfulsoftware.net/2009/02/01/interview-with-craig-peterson-of-beyond-compare/

--
Andy Brice
http://www.hyperplan.com

Your mention of KEdit reminds me that an application that is a bit old on my Windows machine, but which I use almost daily is NoteTab. I use 6.2 standard, which I like better than version 7, because it maintains a standard extended selection editing. I not only like writing in NoteTab -- which edits plain text -- but I use it for cleaning up text from others before I import it into InDesign. I think it is a great little app.

Steve Z.

The application I've used longer than any is MS Word -- going back to the late 1980s with WinWord 1.0 on Windows 2. Although I preferred WordStar, which I used from the early 1980s (I think) but WordStar stopped getting better and rotted away by the late 1980s. I'm sure somewhere I have some WinWord files from those days.

The Mac software I've used longest is Tinderbox and DEVONthink.

xtabber wrote:

John McPhee has used Kedit
exclusively to write all of his books for nearly 30 years, as he
discusses at length in “Draft No. 4,” which many in this
forum would probably find worthwhile reading.

This sounds interesting... If I read that book, would it convince me to shell out $99 for Kedit?

Or are there cheaper alternatives that can do what McPhee likes about it?

Stephen Zeoli wrote:

Your mention of KEdit reminds me that an application that is a bit old
on my Windows machine, but which I use almost daily is NoteTab. I use
6.2 standard, which I like better than version 7, because it maintains a
standard extended selection editing. I not only like writing in NoteTab
-- which edits plain text -- but I use it for cleaning up text from
others before I import it into InDesign. I think it is a great little
app.

Indeed. I use the free version daily for the very same purpose (cleaning up text, especially when copied from PDFs), it's always running.

I also have some tabs open automatically when the app is launched, with stuff I need to remind myself about, such as Autohotkey shortcuts or how to manually edit raw EndNote code.

Kedit is extremely nice and powerful, I used it to write a 400 page book (in LaTeX ...). We're talking 1991 here, using the DOS version Kedit 5.0.
Some standout features include the "all" and "more" commands:

The all "keyword" command would limit selection to lines that included the "keyword" - more could then be used to expand the content around it.
Super helpful to check and modify terminology and cross-references.
Kedit was also known for its REXX support, due to its XEDIT IBM mainframe legacy ...

Count me in as a fan!

Dr Andus wrote:

xtabber wrote:
>John McPhee has used Kedit
>exclusively to write all of his books for nearly 30 years, as he
>discusses at length in “Draft No. 4,” which many in this
>forum would probably find worthwhile reading.

This sounds interesting... If I read that book, would it convince me to
shell out $99 for Kedit?

Or are there cheaper alternatives that can do what McPhee likes about
it?

I would also like to thank xtabber for mentioning John McPhee's book, which I was unaware of.

Perhaps this could be a separate topic, but in the past I have searched quite a bit for other editors like Kedit that provide such "line-oriented" editing. It would be great to have more options filling this niche. In my past searches for text editors that provide some form of saved searches for lines of text within a document, I have found UltraEdit to be the most capable, although EditPad Pro also does this. And there are certainly other options, especially for Windows. I liked the UltraEdit option because I could use it on my Mac, too, although I have yet to purchase it.

xtabber wrote:

I’ve been using the Kedit text editor from Mansfield Software
Group on a daily basis since 1985. Kedit is based on the IBM mainframe
Xedit and is line-oriented (most text editors are buffer-oriented) which
gives it database-like selective editing capabilities that other text
editors simply can't match.