Technology

Ancient industrial machines use ancient windows computers. This has been known forever. There's a whole niche industry of very expensive ram and hard drives and other components keeping this industry going

I know it's not exactly the point of the article but for a lot of things, I reckon a good amount of 'innovation' was pretty pointless. I personally don't think I ever needed anything that Office 2003 can't do... (Of course I don't use any MS office to begin with but you get the point)

The elevator was running Windows XP.

Clearly an extreme case of overengineering. A elevator has no business running more than a few microcontrollers.

I run a computer on Win7 at work, because it needs some important legacy software. It can't be containered because it has a nasty licence manager.

And my oscilloscope runs on Win98.

Mail sorter for a company I worked for uses Windows 3.1.

My parents ancient HP from 1997, I sold the motherboard with popped capacitors for $250. I informed the buyer of the condition and he said he didn't care, he'd fix it, but they needed it for some legacy hardware their company functioned on.

I was tearing out ancient infrastructure for a new office and my eye kept going to a rectangular square box on the wall. Finally realized it was a PC! The cause of death was clear, PSU fan died, killed itself from heat. It was a form factor I had never seen, but standard nonetheless. It was running an answering machine system in DOS, still worked! Such a rare machine I've only found a single reference on the web and a single video about it. 1999, 486XS (I know, would kill for a DX, it's soldered on), upgraded from 2x 2MB SIMMs to a whopping 2x 64MB SIMMs. Imagine what that would have cost in the day!

LONG story, but I got it running Windows 95b. 3.1 was just too much challenge to get it networked and happy. Much pain was removed when I got a USB floppy emulator. Can't do jack without a floppy! Broke the network card drivers, need to start over. Had it running Doom with a legit SoundBlaster card and could RDP into over the network.

It was an amazing journey getting it all together and updated. Most of that knowledge is gone from the internet, and I sure don't remember all the tricks. Going to be my first token ring machine! LOL, had to get parts from Romania and trash cans.

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'm disturbed that an elevator is running a desktop OS. How did this happen? Did they never hear of microcontrollers?

Stuck or preferred choice?

Trapped using software they needed to buy once, vs rent?

I'd still be using Windows 7 if I could.

MS DOS 6.6 for me - I enjoy the power of a 286 processor and much smaller instruction sets.

:O

“Stuck”

Imagine being stuck using something that works for 30 years.

I would still be using Windows 7 if it was safe to connect to the internet.

I can't believe government systems are just open to cyber security like that.

Are there not cyber terrorists for some teenager that has tried to do anything with these unsecured systems?

there's a word for those people: awesome

windows xp was peak; running anything before xp is legendary

"stuck" more like happy to not have to deal with the last 15-ish years of microsoft ruining everything they previously excelled at.

I’m visiting my parents in my home country after many years of not being there. I’m hoping my dad’s old pentium 2 laptop is still around.