Or I have to compile the latest version?
Latest version is strongly recommended, but download Bitcoin Core from
https://bitcoincore.org/en/download/ is more practical.
I think there's a version around 8.8 or 12 that is compatible with the most recent blockchain
You're talking about Bitcoin-qt 0.8.0
I also think the original (0.1.0) version used a public key for identifying who funds were being sent to (making it much bigger than just using a hash of the key)
To be specific, it's uncompressed public key which barely used these days.