I recently purchased a new Acer Desktop machine for my office, and while most of the applications I’ve installed on it are relatively modern, the following two really stood out.
For listening to mp3s, I still use Winamp 2.08, released on January 3, 1999. I’ve tried newer versions a few times but this version does everything I need, and it uses almost no CPU cycles.
For basic picture manipulation (resizing and compressing, mostly) I use LView Pro 1.D2, designed for “Windows 95, Windows NT 3.51, and Windows 3.1 with Win32s 1.30 or newer”. Copyright 1996. I use Photoshop for all my heavy lifting, but for really quick edits, LView does the trick. The only downside is it doesn’t support PNG files (it predates them).
Are there any older apps that you just can’t seem to part with?
CDex, probably, though I’m probably going to transition to something else soon. I also use a really old version of ACDSee that I bought a license for. Newer image viewers seen to be relying more and more on libraries.
I have the exact same version of LView and still use it religiously. I have a 1.x version of Forte Agent newsreader, too!
Goldwave 4.0. My favorite audio editing program. Very similar to Audacity.
I ran LView for a while, then switched to IrfanView, which does PNGs.
I remember getting Free Agent, the Usenet reader, somewhere around 0.9. I still use the paid version today; it’s up to 6.0. (I found a copy of the license file: it’s dated 11/24/98.)
Every once in a while I power up an Altair emulator and run and old Star Trek game I hand typed into my Dad’s Altair back in 1976. So, that’s 34 years there.
Juno email client 5.0, which I don’t think has been updated since 2005. Even though I started using Outlook to access my email a few years back, for some strange reason Juno requires you to use the client software if you ever want or need to change your password. They seem to have no way to allow you to do this on the webmail client, so I have to keep the client handy for password changes. Lame, but I’ve had that same email address since 1996 so I’m rather invested in it.
One Page Calendar (opc.exe). Worked fine with Windows 3.1, and still works with Windows 7.