Within minutes, people were merrily tweeting in, trying to out-do one another with stories of old hardware that was still running perfectly, many years after it should have been rightfully retired to a landfill site in China.

@djbennett999 showed his hand early, claiming his dad still uses a Windows 98 PC with Internet Explorer 6.  He was, frankly, going all in with nothing stronger than a 2 and a 3. No fewer than 37 people arrived at the PC Pro website yesterday with a Windows 98 PC. Seven were still running Windows 95, while 10 diehards darkened our door with a Windows 3.x system. Sorry, @djbennett999, you’re playing with the big boys now.

@graphiclunarkid actually had a hand worth playing. “My father still runs SuperCalc 5 and WordPerfect 5 in DOS boxes, backed up to floppy disk,” he boasted, before pulling an Ace out of his sleeve. “And his A3 dot-matrix printer is 25 yrs old!”.

Not bad. But @sebtoast wasn’t about to let a kid, albeit a graphiclunarkid, walk away with the pot. “I worked at a company that would service IBM systems like the 5362,” he said, providing a link to a website to prove he wasn’t just making this stuff up. “There is a picture of its HDD, which if my memory is correct, weighs 75-100 pounds,” he added in a follow-up tweet. Pah, that’s nothing pal. We’ve got a flash drive that costs £650!

But just as we were about to shuffle the chips in @sebtoast’s direction, @heybatesy suddenly decided to slap his cards on the table. “My father-in-law still has a number of control systems for grain silos in farms across the east, still in use, controlled by VIC-20’s,” he harrumphed. “He would also like to know if anybody is available for some VIC-20 recompiling work – he has the code printouts!”

Thirty-year-old VIC-20s as the backbone of British agriculture? No wonder the industry’s in ruins.

But before we take off our shirt and hand it to the son-in-law of a Commodore-obsessed farmer, we thought we’d open up the debate to the PC Pro blog. Do you know of anything older than @heybatesy’s VIC-20 still in active service? Glory awaits.

Not Microsoft, though. The company may be ploughing on with its next-generation operating system, but it fondly remembers the days when Windows 95 came on no fewer than 13 floppy disks, and is still attempting to keep the flagging old storage technology alive in Windows 7.

This was the message I saw when I attempted to create a password reset disk in Windows 7 over the weekend:

Microsoft’s not even covering the bases: it suggests floppy drives ahead of those new-fangled USB sticks, so determined is the company to keep the 3.5in clickers alive.

Is someone on commission over there in Redmond? We demand answers.