Classic Computers (other than your own) Still In Action?

[Pantechnicon]

Do you know a teacher (not in the hobby) who still runs education apps on her Apple ][? How about a business you know of that has to periodically access old customer records from VisiCalc? Let's hear some stories or riveting anecdotes about classic computers you've seen that are still up and running out in the real world.

To narrow things down a bit, exclude your own machines. Obviously if you didn't like old computers you wouldn't be in this forum :P. For added challenge, try to limit sightings to machines you've seen running after the year 2000. The turn of the century is as good a cutoff as any.

Here's one to start:

-The senior pastor of my brother's church, age 102 (really, she's 102), is still running the magic show with an original IBM PC. She's got sermon notes, bible software, congregation rolls etc. all going back 25 years and tucked away into something like a 10MB hard drive.

Keep them coming...

[Daltone]

The Primary School I went to loved their BBCs. We did all sorts of stuff with them - word processing, controlling an electronic 'turtle' that would draw on paper and playing games like Granny's Garden, amongst other things. They're still used with the younger kids. I'd really love to get one.

[Blanka789]

I saw a truss company using a chart pricing system that they only had stored on a kaypro two weeks ago.

[Saabmeister]

Lets see...

Althought they're really not that old, the school my mom works for still has a bunch of Power Mac 5200's

The Science Museum Of Minnesota has a bunch of B&W Compact Mac's in their exhibits

My high school had a few Mac 128k's floating around

The elementary school I went to has a few Apple II's in the special ed department, and has a lab of LCII's

[cyberfluxor]

At my moms work they have an old Pentium laptop that runs Windows 95 that doesn't really get much work for them done and mainly sits in a closet as a last resort. It's a laptop orrowed for employees to do some extended business at home or on the road at job sites. They have a stack of far superior laptops so I've been waiting for nearly 2yrs (That's how long I've known about it) for when they want to get rid of it.

At one of my friends houses they have computers in every room of the house because they're tech/sci-fi geeks. They have a bunch of older and newer computers and I want to say it includes a few older MACs. I've only been in his house a few times in the past 7yrs I've known him so I can't be too sure.

At my university they have math labs where people go to do problem worksheets on the computer and those systems are so lagged out of our space it just blows horribly. Half the time their network goes down in there because the bandwidth is so small in that room, all it takes is everyone logging in at once or running a program because everything is stored on a network drive. :roll:

[Pantechnicon]

I just thought of another one: On more than one occassion I've seen the reporter who covers our local amateur hockey team for the Albuquerque Journal using a Tandy Model 200 laptop to write up his notes. I was really big into "Model T's" a few years back and went up to him one night at a game to ask him about it. His rationale was that it was both much lighter as well as having far superior battery life to a modern lappy. Nothing better for quick and dirty texting. He also mentioned that for all those reasons, there was more than one newspaper reporter out in the field still using those things. Right on... 8-)

[bangtango]

I once taught Sunday school at a church which used some real old computer. I don't remember the make or much about it, but all the kids I worked with used to play a version of Frogger on there, which I happened to set the all-time high score on with my first or second game. This was barely three years ago.

[robotriot]

My brother was visiting a professional German animation studio about a year ago, and they still used Amigas with Take_2 for linetesting. The same is true for Futurama btw, as can be seen in the extras-section of the DVD set :)

My school had a Commodore-IBM PC in use for photo sensor experiments, at least until 2001.