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.