Old hardware or emulation of old operating systems on new hardware.

Quite common on old industrial machinery and other capital equipment like lab equipment. San Francisco BART for example has to scrounge eBay for old motherboards that still allow DMA to parallel ports via southbridge because it’s too expensive to validate a new design for controllers.

I have a G5 with a bunch of old boxed software that runs as well as it did the day I bought it. And an Xbox 360 with the same. Not everything has to keep up with the times.

I remember visiting a doctor, about ten years ago (so well into the 21st Century). His laptop was an old one, running NT.

The software they would buy, cost tens of thousands of dollars, and they couldn’t afford to keep upgrading (or the original vendor went belly-up).

Not all software can be sufficiently insulated from external changes, but almost all software I care about can be. My normal update cadence is every 2-3 years, and that's only because of a quirk in my package manager making it annoying for shiny new tools to coexist with tools requiring old dependencies. The most important software I use hasn't changed in a decade (i.e., those updates were no-ops), save for me updating some configurations and user scripts once in awhile. I imagine that if I were older the 18yr effective-update-cycle would happen naturally as well.

My gut reaction is that the software you're describing relies heavily on external integrations. Is that correct?

The software that I wrote was a device communication SDK, written in C. It abstracted the hardware/link stuff, and presented a common API.

Basically, a driver. Pretty involved one.

There's someone who posted on HN yesterday about running Kubuntu on the same PC for 18 years:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47502310

He had upgrades, but I was running Kubuntu about 20 years ago, still have a bunch of Red Hat and Mandrake ISOs from the early 2000s, and can confirm they still work.