At one tine, Slackware Linux would not recompile binaries unless the program was patched. So there was a time you could find rather old binaries on Slackware, and maybe still on other distros.
I wonder what the oldest unchanged source/program running on Linux or BSD ? My vote goes to cat(1) :)
[–] toast0 3 days ago
[–] queenkjuul 2 days ago
I have some old Linux CDROM games from ~2000 that are nigh impossible to run, and even a lot of really old software fails to run on old (2.x) kernels without recompilation. But Slackware 4.x wasn't particularly good at this in my testing (i started on a slackware-based retro computing distro[0] but my HDD died with no backup before i finished it)
I mean, other than installing an old distro in old hardware, which i do enjoy. I got a CD copy of Mandrake Gaming Edition on eBay with a bundled port of SimCity 3000 that's very good at running old commercial Linux games.
I think there's people shipping ancient glibc with flatpaks to accomplish this today
Otoh, /usr/bin/true has only minor changes since initial import (1994) https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd-src/commits/main/usr.bin/...
/usr/bin/false is similar