this post was submitted on 18 May 2025
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At my old workplace, there was numerous XP machines still going. They were running old machine equipment, and basically served as a controller for the entire machine.
As it turns out, it was cheaper to keep these XP stations, instead of buying a completely new Hydrolic press, or whatever it was running, which cost several hundred of thousands of dollars.
One day one of these computers stopped working, and we immediately tried to get the software to work on a brand new W10 replacement. Took us a week of drivers hell, until we eventually went to the basement, found an exact replica, and swapped the HDD over.
The company, making these heavy machineries, went bankrupt in the early 2000s, and there was literally no way of getting the software to run on anything besides that original box.
I'd like a law that software / hardware companies who file for bankruptcies must release the source / files for their tech to an open source repository.
If you are a big company there are often ESCROW agreements for things like this. I have encountered the “data dumps” from time to time and whilst it’s “better” it’s not ideal. Half finished documentarian, virtual machines of mis-configured OS installs… it’s almost as if it was just a straight copy of the development environment as it was just as they made the final version of the software…
But it’s better than nothing.
Main issue I can see with this forcing open source would be libraries and frameworks licensed from others who would likely still be in business and wouldn’t agree to those parts becoming open sourced. See also WinAMP https://www.theregister.com/2024/10/16/opensourcing_of_winamp_goes_badly/
That idea often comes up in these discussions and I've never really had an argument against. Best I got is that parts of that software may have moved to more modern stuff that was purchased by another company. But that's a damned thin excuse not to implement this.
I like that idea bit it'll never fly. That software is an asset. A bankrupt company needs every asset to be sold to cover as much percentage of their debt to their vendors as possible. I've been in a company that went bankrupt and I've been the vendor of a company that went bankrupt. Being the vendor was the harder experience.
I'm sure it makes the bean counters happier to have another asset valued at X amount, but in practice the software will just be locked in some vault where it won't do anyone any good.
Its an instance where the number on the screen doesn't actually correspond to any useful economic activity.
To bad
Yup. Take backups, have spares, and keep it off the Internet and it'll work just fine.
Pro tip, you can get IDE to CF adapters if you want to put an SSD in those old machines to really see them fly. Just be aware that they don't have nearly as good write durability as a real SSD, so keep write heavy operations on the HDD.
You can get industrial grade CF cards that use SLC memory. They have much better write endurance than normal CF cards.
There's still things like that on my workplace today. I think there's some older, rarely used CNC with Win98 on the controller. We just keep spares around when they break, but that's cheaper than replacing the whole machinery. Also there's some XP stations running software for an industrial machine which would cost quarter of a million to replace. Some of those need access to network drives and such but they live in a strictly isolated VLAN.
And, as far as I've told at least, there was no option at any point to upgrade just the computers on those things. It's always the whole assembly line or whatever they're connected to. There's not many companies willing to throw hundreds of thousands every 3-5 years to replace perfectly working equipment.
It's funny, because this scenario actually happened in our CNC hall.
The guys over there were working with SolidWorks and Mastercam. I never really got too involved with their work, other than installing the software remotely for them.
It could very well have been a CNC machine that this procedure was about. I just know that they had all kinds of equipment in there, along with a hydrolic press, which peaked my interest the most because of a certain Finnish youtuber haha.
Me over here with a dirty mind 100% positive that I'm not using "CNC" the same way you are. I don't know what your way means, but my way is more fun.
CNC—computer numerical control, where a computer makes the cutty/smushy/printy parts move through meatspace.
CNC—computer numerical control, where a computer makes the cutty/smushy/printy parts move through meatspace.
I set up a 32 bit Windows 7 VM so my dad could keep using his old drawing program that was built for Windows 3.11.
It was the last version of Windows to support 3.11 compabillity.
Works well.
Just a note: Windows software for controlling hardware is highly likely to assume a)direct access to the hardware (sometimes mediated thorough ancient APIs and assuming the existence of defunct expansion slots) and b) assume meatspace time can be counted using OS timing ticks (which get stretched out as modern VMs timeshare with other processes underneath the virtulized hardware). It is awfully tough to replace them sometimes.
Yeah, I suspect you gotta do something similar to what McLaren did when the special mid 90s computer they used for the F1 got too hard to replace as they broke, they built a new computer interface that was compatible with modern computers and allowed them to interface with the car
lol what drawing program?
Macrografx Designer 3.1:
https://winworldpc.com/product/micrografx-designer/31
At one of my old works we had a SMT machine allegedly built in 2012 which was running on XP. Worked flawlessly 🤷
There are third parties that create new software for old industrial machines for this exact reason.
Yeah, and as long as these things never touch the internet, there really isn't an issue.