What's the longest you've used a program or a web site?

[Pawnless Endgame]

It's important to keep your anti-virus up to date, but otherwise, this is a social experiment really, just to see how long you've hung onto other stuff for.

My first PC was delivered in March 1999. I was 20 years old, so I was late on the bandwagon for someone of that age. My first mobile was September 2000, so again I was late for the age that I was.

MS Office '97 came with that 1999 PC, and I just kept the CD for it. It has worked fine on every subsequent PC that I have owned, and so it has now become an experiment on how long I can make it last. I have installed it on PCs running Windows 95 (original 1999 PC), Windows 98, 2000, XP, Vista, 7, 8.1, 10 and it still works on Win 11! Please note it's a single user retail license, which I remove from my previous PCs. I skipped Windows Millennium for obvious reasons

Paintshop Pro is another example. I briefly ran PSP5 and PSP6 on shareware trials, before finally settling with a licensed copy of PSP7 in year 2000. I wasn't keen on the look of PSP8, so again this has ran fine on every PC up to Win 11.

I have used Firefox since 2002, when it was the Mozilla suite. Unlike Office '97 and PSP7 though, I have always kept Firefox up to date. Before Firefox, I used Netscape which is what Firefox was before it got open-sourced as Mozilla.

I still use Winamp with a classic skin. Remember back in 1999 when Winamp vs Sonique was all the rage?!

For other programs though, I was late to the party. Didn't get Steam until 2013, and didn't get Spotify until 2016. I didn't get Windows XP until 2006, so that was pretty late.

Web sites:

I signed up to eBay in January 2001 (which is quite late in the grand scheme of things). I did get PayPal straight away though, back in a time when it was PayPal vs NoChex. You had to read 2 small random reductions (less than £1) made by PayPal on your next bank statement before you could secure your PP account.

For Overclockers, I knew about the shop before the forum. The shop was 2003 for me and the forum was 2004. That was after the nuke, so again fairly late in the grand scheme of things.

I was also on a few clubbing forums 20 years ago but they have all gone now.

Again on the flipside, I was (very!) late to Facebook - 2016. Never had a Twitter account, nor Snapchat, TikTok, Pinterest, Instagram etc. I have got deviantART though 2008 which I still use as I still find it interesting. I don't find Facebook remotely interesting though, so I just keep FB for the odd contacts who only use FB as their means of communication.

WhatsApp was 2016, so again late to the party.

 

[Pawnless Endgame]

Longest used website: overclockers forums since 1999

Longest used software (not including Windows itself of course): Navigator, which then became Firebird (rising from the ashes like a phoenix) and later Firefox.

I knew OcUK was around in 2002 (before I started using it) but didn't realise it was pre-2000!

I forgot about the Phoenix/Firebird names. It was because I stuck with the Mozilla suite until 2006 so didn't get to use the Phoenix/Firebird names or even use Firefox 1. I just jumped to Firefox 2 when it came out.

Well, I have used this website since 2007. Looks like my Amazon account is the same age. Seems 2007 is the oldest that I still use. Apart from Nvidia and AMD driver sites.

I forgot about Amazon. 2004 for me for Amazon and by that point, it was selling everything. My first purchase was an Olympus digital camera + XD card (before SD cards ruled the planet!)

I signed up for Amazon in 1998 so that would be the earliest website that I still use. I remember being very unsure about using my credit card over the internet but it was fine, as far as I know.

Amazon in 1998 - impressive! That would have been a book shop then.

I've been going to Gamespot for games info, reviews etc since the mid/late 90s when I was 6 or 7 years old haha.

Never used Gamespot, but I have a 2003 account with Gamefaqs and still go on there occasionally.

Facebook I guess is 15 years by this point almost, not that I use it much anymore.

Yeah I think 2007 was around the time when Facebook started getting big.

Everything pre ~2005 i think has been nuked. Geocities is one of my first memories. Most places have gone now. 3drealms forums still going i think.

There aren't many bad things I can say about web 1.0, but definitely good riddance to Geocities, along with FortuneCity, Angelfire and Tripod. Infested with pop-up ads! By this point though, some ISP offered 10 megabytes of web space, so it was enough space for a few HTML pages + graphics / animated GIFs if you knew HTML or use something like Frontpage or Netscape Composer.

Started using Excel with v3 in 1991 (I used Supercalc prior to that), moving to Excel 4 in 92. Didn't start using Word until a bit later as I preferred to use Ami Pro for my word processing.

I was in secondary school in 1991, 2nd year (as a year 8). We probably did have Excel on the Windows 3.1 / 386 and 486 computers, although the first time I have heard of word "Excel" being used was as a password. One of the pupils wrote a QBASIC program called The System and the password to get into it was "Excel"

 

[Pawnless Endgame]

Funny, I never got on WhatsApp until April 2019. Only because of my Aunt, that's the funny part. Sadly I lost my Aunt the other night to Cancer.

I'm sorry to hear that

I remember them well. They were like bricks.

The batteries were beefy though. You certainly never had those issues with batteries. You'd charge them once a week they were that beefy in power.

Yeah those Nokias were indestructible, and like you said they only needed charging once a week.

I'm curious though, what kept you tied to Winamp? I cannot remember the last time I used it. Maybe 2008/9 or 2010.

I think I kept Winamp through habit. Spotify is my main player for commercial music, but I also have a lot of amateur / unsigned music from mp3.com, Soundclick, Soundcloud, Freeplay Music and so on, and I use Winamp as my MP3 player for those. I also write my own music and have lots of tape recordings from the 1990s which I converted to MP3 and use Winamp to play those as well.

I was going to say. When they were known for books. I remember getting Unreal Tournament in 1999 or may have likely been 2000 from Amazon for £8 brand new. When was it they started branching out?

I think it was early 2000s when Amazon branched out from books to include CDs and DVDs, to make it a rival to play.com (anyone remember that site?), then by the time I started using Amazon in 2004, it had already expanded to electronics as I got my camera from there that year.

Windows notepad and windows paint forever

Can't go wrong with MS Paint It used to be called Zsoft Paint (Zsoft as in the company that originally wrote it), and they also invented the PCX file format. My Dad took me into his office one Saturday morning in 1986/7 and he showed me a PC for the very first time. Was pretty impressed with the 16+ colour graphics, at a time when most home computers only had 8 colours. When Microsoft bought out Paint, it became more basic, but in recent Windows versions, they have added more features back in.

Oh wait, I still play Doom which I got in 1994. Does that count?

That counts. Congrats!

The oldest site I still visit is gamefaqs, which got bought out by Gamespot.

I mentioned Gamefaqs up-thread, with reference to Gamespot. Didn't realise they're the same company now.