The app that lasted for 27 years! 😅

This week, I received a call from one of my longest running customers. They run a group of pawn shops in my town, and I wrote them a database app to manage their stores back in 1993 - about 27 years ago!

The app has had 3 major re-writes in that time, and has had virtually zero downtime in all those years. It has run on a Windows/Citrix based system using MySQL as the database. They asked me last year to convert it to a fully cloud based system, but I said it would be super expensive and also that I had very little time these days due to my other startup taking off.

So in the call, they were really apologetic, but said that they had a deal offered to them by an online pawn shop management company to transfer their business to them and they felt really bad.

I told them not to feel bad - in fact, I was ecstatic as I could now focus 110% on my startup that is starting to really take off. Also, I was keeping an ancient Windows laptop running purely to manage their old codebase, so it would be a relief to finally sunset that hardware. I wished them all the best and offered to help with the migration of data to the new platform.

I figure nearly 3 decades is a good run for an app. I have another customer in town who is still using a bus chartering/booking system that I wrote for them 25 years ago now. Wonder if they will take over the record in a couple of years or whether they will find an alternative soon?

BTW - that pawn shop customer (husband and wife team) became really close friends over the years and they even attended our wedding and seen our kids grow to adults during that time!