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.
this post was submitted on 18 May 2025
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Good for them. If it works, it works. I wouldn't connect it to the internet though.
Nuclear silos.. is that early dos system I believe?
As long as things are not connected and not trying to add newer stuff , what's the problem?
Why not? Still using Windows 7 on one of my ThinkPads. It's a solid system, if you know what you're doing and how to use is safely.
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I would bet there are still a few old pieces of industrial machinery around that I duct taped together by imaging an ancient PC and transferring it to a Virtual Box VM.
There are many, many machines out there running 95 and even earlier versions. The issue is that a machine from 30 years ago is almost always still using the software that came with the machine… 30 years ago.
Even if the OS has received security patches, which isn’t even assured, the company may either no longer be in business, or charge for new OS drivers/specialized software.
In many cases, your options are literally to replace an entire machine worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, or deal with the networking nightmare that is “keep this on the network, but not on the network.”
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We've got multiple tools still on Windows 2000, happily running production. They're on an airgapped network though, so no issues.
People keep saying to keep these XP machines off the internet. I seriously doubt there's much threat, especially for even older OS's like 98 and 95. It's the very devil just trying to browse with them, nothing much out there is going to be able to attack them. Security through obscurity indeed!
In any case, we're no longer in the Wild West days when people had machines hooked directly to the internet and a firewall was a third-party addon. LOL, ZoneAlarm anyone!
We all have a basic firewall built into our routers so unless you deliberately expose services you're fairly bulletproof to scanners. I remember scanning for Win2000 machines in blocks of IPs, long after it was defunct. Plenty were out there!
You are forgetting targeted attacks. A blind attack would pretty much not have much of an effect indeed, however if the attacker knows the machine, then it's easy for the attackers to exploit these vulnerability if left "out in the open", and cause havoc, possibly create a lot of damages or leech informations pumped into those machines via old Windows installations.
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I had a 486DX running DOS for writing and editing CAM programs for CNC mills, lathes, pipe bender, and a laser cutter. And for funsies, an even older Macintosh that booted from a 5 1/4" floppy that ran a CMM, (co-ordinate measuring machine). And the software for the CMM ran from another 5 1/4" floppy.
This was about 2017 before I retired as a toolmaker.