This paper will be written as a part of my Ph.D. research. Old firms in the Netherlands' which is a research project in the theme of the demography of firms in the research school Systems, Organizations and Management from the University of Groningen, the Netherlands. The demography of firms is relatively new in the Spatial Sciences but nevertheless this is a subject with a long history in other fields of research. The demography of firms is the study of the changes in the population of firms with the use of demographic tools. This field of research can broaden our knowledge of regional-economic dynamics of firms. Other disciplines that investigated this subject are mostly interdisciplinary, using combinations of methods and theories from sociology, economy, demography and geography. In this paper, the focus will not be on the theoretical background of firm demography, but on the dynamics of the survival of firms. This is part of the 'narrow' definition of firm demographics in Economic Geography as mentioned above. This definition includes birth, death, migration and survival in the population of firms. In this paper, the emphasis will be on the exploration of the definition of 'old' in the context of the firm lifecycle. This will be done using a chronological description of Dutch firm activity in the period from the industrial revolution until the present, and by a representation of the location of firm establishments in maps during this period. Furthermore, a list provided by the Dutch Chamber of Commerce of the 500 oldest establishments in the Netherlands at present will be compared with these maps to get more insight in the 'survival rates of firms in the different industrial sectors. One of the difficulties here is the definition of ''old'' in the context of the firm lifecycle. When is a firm old? Is it possible to characterise a firm on the basis of age in years, or can this only be done in relationship to the age of the attributes (products, employees, organisation or establishment) which form the ...