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this post was submitted on 09 May 2025
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I'm kind of shocked that it's only been 18 years since the last 486 chip was made. It was launched in 1989 and discontinued in 2008, while the original Pentium was launched in 1993 and discontinued in 1999. Hell, the Pentium 4 was discontinued in 2007.
There's no way in hell 2007 was 18 years ago.
I think you can still buy new 486 compatible chips today.
https://www.vortex86.com/
It's quite incredible, and very interesting. I wonder why they continued to produce these CPUs.
Probably for industrial machines.
Yeah, the amount of industrial machinery being controlled by ancient hardware would baffle a lot of people.
For a comparison people might relate to: There are ATMs running twenty year old versions of Windows XP.
Yup. Airplanes, for example, take a lot of validation. It's extremely expensive to retest a new configuration, so they make one computer, get it validated, and use it unmodified for the next thirty years.
This is why the Boeing Max 8 thing was a big deal. They made approved modifications, but found in rare conditions it could cause unexpected and dangerous flight conditions. But, a times b times c was estimated to be less than the cost of doing it properly, so they didn't.
Same with industrial automation. There's some robotic arms, assembly lines, etc in use today that still use PCs with ISA slots (the predecessor to PCI, which was the predecessor to PCIe) which is why you'll occasionally see newish "industrial" motherboards that have ISA slots and parallel ports.
A project I worked on at university (way back in 2010) was for one of the largest providers of air traffic control systems. Our project was interesting - usage of eye tracking and screen recording via VNC for training of air traffic controllers - but it was even more interesting to learn about some of their processes.
Whenever they built an ATC system for a client, they'd build one or two spares at the same time, with exactly identical hardware. They did this for two reasons:
We got to see a storage room with a large number of these systems. Lots of different PCs anywhere from a month to maybe 15 years old. :)
Dude when those emails came out and we saw the engineer talking about how he wouldn’t let his own family fly on one to another engineer when asked…truly slackjawed moment.
WTF can you link this?