When looking at my web stats today I saw something that kind of floored me. This made me think hay just ask around and see where this goes.
Anyway what I saw in my web stats is someone actually came to my website not long ago with a Windows 3.1 machine. I have seen Windows 95, 98 and 2000 as well but never Windows Millennium does not mean Millennium has never visited.
So I pose the question? Will old Windows systems ever die or are we stuck with them forever?
Curious to see what others think.
They will die eventually… because at some point those computers will break and go to the bin. Unless someone has a virtual machine, of course. 
It’s also interesting to look at the behaviour of these “users”. I’ve seen IE6/Win98 “users” automate form submissions. A lot of crappy (presumably old!) bots seem to use old user agents, although, I have noticed this trend die down slightly.
Old OSs never die. They just … er, go OS … to China?
No they won’t I built my entire webserver and wordpress site from my mac that’s from 2007 running osx lion — built nginx and wordpress site, and also about 12 others. this is my latest project. Thank god for cloud computing!
That’s not that old…
In the end, they will die. Not many people make a point of using an ancient OS that only runs ancient programs. The great thing is, in theory, you can run a modern browser on an ancient OS and get just as good service as on a modern OS.
I think Windows 10 will bring most windows users off old windows machines. I still use Windows 7 because it seems better than the newer windows versions to me. But I will upgrade to Windows 10 (in about 6 months, once the main compatibility issues are discovered and fixed). Windows 10 could be the dawn of a whole new type of OS; I am especially looking forward to the augmented reality features (about time!).
My father is still using the 1984 IBM PC XT (8086) that he bought second-hand in 1987. DOS 3.31, 640K of RAM, 16 color monitor, soft-click keyboard, and tractor-feed dot-matrix printer. Great for shipping labels, and printing (sideways) his checkbook register for sending to his tax preparer.
He has a system with Win7 on it, too. 
I’ve still got an old Win98 disk somewhere 
I’m surprised that anyone using anything older then XP is still connecting to the Internet
I still have my old Windows 98
But everything “important” has been burned to disk and I only fire it up on the rare occasion I want to use an old app that I haven’t gotten a newer replacement for yet.
I wouldn’t use it for the internet or anything else, much too clunky and version locked for that now.
I might use my win98 disk at some point to create a virtual machine, a few old games don’t like it when there is too much RAM
OT I see, can’t help it! 
I still have a working Atari Mega running Calamus (only system I ever had that to the less than a tenth of a millimeter matched the displayed document to the printed output). Customized and hotted to 16MHz with two 30MB harddrives and a monochrome portrait monitor. The 300dpi mono-laser printout takes 30s, still quite fast. I learned the first hyper text markup on that machine.
It will never die, I’ll have working emulaters and some nostalgic games left like Lemmings and Jumping Jack and Bubbles. I still have a modem somewhere but no BBS in sight. 
[quote=“Erik_J, post:11, topic:190427”]
I still have a modem somewhere but no BBS in sight. [/quote]
I also still have not only a used modem and a brand new one as well. On top of that I actually have an external modem.
Chances are they will never be used, however since I never print anything I do not have a printer, so it is possible if someone wanted me to fax something I could use modem and my old faxing software and even connect the old flat bed scanner if needed.
As for old os’es I use nothing older than xp but do have coa’s and media for 95, 98 and 2000 which could be vm’ed if needed or used to recover files for people that used the older versions of Microsoft backup if necessary.
Another old app worth keeping is Microsoft Works to help people recover files created with that which was very common a few years ago.
Unsupported old operating system will eventually die. I might be using windows xp today if microsoft did not stop supporting it.
Good point
For many co$t is the bottom line, that and the “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it” attitude.
Being on the “bleeding edge” is not a priority for most.
Only when the “old” becomes broken will they move on
A lot different from us techies that have an “oh, let me try that” approach
I do not know where did you get that information but I know that microsoft stop supporting windows xp since April 8, 2014. You can still use it no problem and it will work just fine. In fact it is still used in most companies here in the Philippines and I read that it is still widely used in Eastern Europe.
[quote=“Bigwas, post:16, topic:190427, full:true”]
I do not know where did you get that information but I know that microsoft stop supporting windows xp since April 8, 2014. You can still use it no problem and it will work just fine. In fact it is still used in most companies here in the Philippines and I read that it is still widely used in Eastern Europe.
[/quote]You can still use it, but Microsoft said they would no longer support it. That means that they won’t release new security updates (although it seems like they have continued to do so) and patches, and they will no longer maintain or update online support resources. Yes, you can still use it (and I am), but it starts to get potentially more risky.
I have a number of XP64 machines at work, and they work just fine. It’s just you don’t get pestered by Microsoft updates all the time with support ended.
IE can’t be upgraded past version 8, but you can still use the latest Firefox or Chrome.
The old IE is actually handy for checking polyfill.
I don’t think they will ever die… I used XP forever and just recently started using Windows 7 and love it. Vista and 8 suck.
They won’t. For, as long as there are people still using old OS. It will never die.
Also, depends on the installed application/s. I discovered several months ago that Canon’s software no longer supports WinXP. New versions of their lens data installer and photo software cannot be installed on XP. Customers who purchase Canon cameras nowadays must own a computer with Win 7 or later. For me, a bummer. I believe that has been true for “new” Adobe products for at least as long, too.
MS still pushes security updates to the products that need them, even if installed on XP boxes, but nothing for the XP O/S that I’m aware of.