If you thought Windows 95 was dead, think again. Apparently, the long outdated operating system is still in use on a farm near Düsseldorf, Germany, just as it has been for decades. Not bad for an operating system that just celebrated its 30-year anniversary on August 24th.
Every day, an egg sorting machine running on Windows 95 processes up to 40,000 eggs, reliably separating them according to size, weight, and origin. According to one German news report, the Windows 95-powered machine is about 40 by 40 meters big (or 131 by 131 feet) and packs the eggs into boxes of six or ten to be sold in supermarkets.
Farmer Peter Huber says, “Windows 95 has been running smoothly ever since this thing was installed here. If something hangs somewhere, I just reboot. And then it boots up again on its own. It runs more smoothly than newer programs.”
The software’s primary purpose is to register the results of its sorting and processing, after which an equally ancient Brother printer—one that’s still compatible with Windows 95—takes care of the screen printouts. Should the printer ever fail, the egg farmer will have to find another old printer that still works with Windows 95.
What’s curious about this situation is that even if Huber wanted to switch the entire system to newer software, it wouldn’t work. The programmer who wrote the software for the egg sorting machine is no longer reachable and can’t be commissioned for updates or patches. If the software were to crash completely one day and stop working, the farmer would have to do all the record-keeping by hand again. (Fortunately, the actual sorting of the eggs is fully mechanical and runs without software.)
Huber is not considering buying a new egg sorting machine. After all, a new machine costs as much as a house and doesn’t actually do much more than the existing machine.
It’s pretty wild that Windows 95 remains relevant even as it crosses its 30-year anniversary in 2025. Learn more about how Windows 95 saved companies from a global IT meltdown and how Windows 95 is still crucial for modern air traffic control.
This article originally appeared on our sister publication PC-WELT and was translated and localized from German.
