Their excellent backward compatibility and longevity is both their strongest point and their eventual weakness. Part of it is likely because the same familiar desktop environment is also able to act as a server environment, and so it's had a huge sticking power.
I'd like to think that Linux as a platform for running such systems would have gotten a mention but it seems that BBC is unaware it exists.
Generally no, and that's a feature, not a bug. The main problem you run into is dynamically linked dependencies. If a program depends on some particular behavior in a particular version of a library that has been updated, it won't work on a modern system with modern libraries. You can work around it in most cases, but it's not particularly easy or straightforward.
Old programs with statically linked dependencies might work, but you run into issues where the GUI framework is broken or incompatible or your window manager doesn't like it. Lots of little random stuff like that.
Windows is best in class at backwards compatability, though whether that's a good thing is up for debate.
Depends; you should be able to still run binaries from the 90s, but if it's dynamically linked and doesn't ship with the libraries finding compatible libraries might be a pain and it won't run out the box. If you have the source code, then it should usually compile with minimal or no changes unless it depends on very old libraries that have seen incompatible changes (which is often the case). One of the nicer things about Windows is that it's a much more comprehensive "batteries included" system.
We encountered this recently - we have some monitoring software for a ride that was written in-house by a guy who no longer works for us. It was running on a Windows XP machine that needed connectivity via 2 serial ports.
We ended up creating a disk image then emulating the machine in Hyper-V and passing through 2 usb-based serial ports. Works like a charm!
Where I’ve seen these systems most in my work is connected to scientific instruments, where the manufacturer would rather you spend another half million dollars for a marginally improved model with more recent io and os support vs shipping a patch for the machine you already paid a quarter million for 15 years ago.
The system being slow and old doesn’t matter. It is running xp and airgapped. Sometimes you access the data by usb stick or burning a cd rom. The software stack it runs mainly dumps sensor data onto a flat file so its not really necessary to be very robust. And sure the ancient optiplex desktop idling all day drinks more electricity than a modern light weight chip, but that couple dollars more a week if that in electricity costs is hardly a concern in research setting.
I took a few old systems that 'only ran on XP' and upgraded them to Windows 10 and an SSD. They worked fine. I guess sometimes it is just that the manufacturer didn't want to take the risk.
Read the article. Its mostly to do with inertia in large organisations or multiple failed projects to replace old systems
For the people who use this old technology, life can get tedious. For four years, psychiatrist Eric Zabriskie would show up to his job at the US Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) and start the day waiting for a computer to boot up. "I had to get to the clinic early because sometimes it would take 15 minutes just to log into the computer," Zabriskie says. "Once you're in you try to never log out. I'd hold on for dear life. It was excruciatingly slow."
..
Most VA medical facilities manage health records using a suite of tools launched by the US government in 1997 called the Computerized Patient Record System (CPRS). But it works on top of an even older system called VistA – not to be confused with the Windows Vista operating system – which first debuted in 1985 and was originally built on the operating system MS-DOS.
The VA is now on its fourth attempt to overhaul this system after a series of fits and starts that dates back almost 25 years. The current plan is to replace it with a health record system used by the US Department of Defense by 2031. "VA remains steadfast in its commitment to implementing a modernised, interoperable Federal [electronic health record] system to improve health care delivery and positively impact patient care," says VA press secretary Pete Kasperowicz. He says the system is already live at six VA sites and will be deployed at 19 out of 170 facilities by 2026.
> start the day waiting for a computer to boot up. "I had to get to the clinic early because sometimes it would take 15 minutes just to log into the computer
Thank god that Windows 11 only needs about 3 minutes to boot up and 2 more to be usable after login in a corporate environment. How the times fly. /s
Some businesses are still using DEC PDP-11s, first released in the 1970s. Those are even more "ancient." Many of these are used for industrial controls, among other applications.
The article does not mention what OS is being used, but RT-11 was designed for "real-time" applications. That was released in 1973, so over 50 years ago.
Gosh - I'm surprised those still run. That the first computer I used back in 1978 or so. I see there's an emulator, SIMH, that will let you run PDP-11 stuff on Linux.
> A while back we looked into upgrading one of the computers to Windows Vista. By the time we added up the money it would take to buy new licenses for all the software, it was going to cost $50,000 or $60,000 [£38,000 to £45,000]
I wonder if at some point virtualizing, and potentially adding a modern control layer on top of their current machines is a potential path forward.
No it isn’t. I tech infrastructure gets the same treatment as regular infrastructure: we don’t want to build a new one because the old one kinda still works and a new one would cost us money.
The reality is that you need to keep upgrading and building new infrastructure. Because inevitably the old one won’t work or no longer be enough to support the needs of the users. And when that happens, it will be even more painful and expensive to get it up and running again. And the best case scenario would be that no one loses their lives over it.
This is what I see in a lot of systems. E.g. costco inventory manager you can see at their manager stations looks like its old dos software but its running in some sort of container on a modern i5 workstation. Some of my friends in sales use similar setups.
My modernest operating system is a current distro of Ubuntu.
Still in love with my Mac OS 10.6 (Snow Leopard) tax machine (offline).
I keep another machine of the same era (Intel Core2Duo) online with Win7Pro, for official paperwork/logins. Doesn't seem to be hacked / compromised, yet (what people usually say).
Also rocking modern Apple Silicon (M2Pro/3/4) which is impressive equipment, particularly considering their miniscule power usage. The current 15" MacBookAir will stream video for the majority of a day on a single charge, and from CostCo can be occassionally purchased for $849 (which includes an additional year of warranty).
A call to action for anyone with a 5 1/4" floppy drive:
> The only thing missing from Grigar's collection is a PC that reads five-and-a-quarter-inch floppy disks, she says. Despite their ubiquity, the machines are surprisingly hard to find. "I look on eBay, Craigslist, I have friends out looking for me, nothing. I've been looking for six years," she says. If you have one of these old computers lying around, and it still works, Grigar would love to hear from you.
Readit News
I'd like to think that Linux as a platform for running such systems would have gotten a mention but it seems that BBC is unaware it exists.
Which ended with Windows 10. There are a lot of old Win95 era games which do not run on Windows 10.
Old programs with statically linked dependencies might work, but you run into issues where the GUI framework is broken or incompatible or your window manager doesn't like it. Lots of little random stuff like that.
Windows is best in class at backwards compatability, though whether that's a good thing is up for debate.
We ended up creating a disk image then emulating the machine in Hyper-V and passing through 2 usb-based serial ports. Works like a charm!
People are upset because their hardware is still working??
Is it better if it just stopped working one day?
The system being slow and old doesn’t matter. It is running xp and airgapped. Sometimes you access the data by usb stick or burning a cd rom. The software stack it runs mainly dumps sensor data onto a flat file so its not really necessary to be very robust. And sure the ancient optiplex desktop idling all day drinks more electricity than a modern light weight chip, but that couple dollars more a week if that in electricity costs is hardly a concern in research setting.
For the people who use this old technology, life can get tedious. For four years, psychiatrist Eric Zabriskie would show up to his job at the US Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) and start the day waiting for a computer to boot up. "I had to get to the clinic early because sometimes it would take 15 minutes just to log into the computer," Zabriskie says. "Once you're in you try to never log out. I'd hold on for dear life. It was excruciatingly slow."
..
Most VA medical facilities manage health records using a suite of tools launched by the US government in 1997 called the Computerized Patient Record System (CPRS). But it works on top of an even older system called VistA – not to be confused with the Windows Vista operating system – which first debuted in 1985 and was originally built on the operating system MS-DOS.
The VA is now on its fourth attempt to overhaul this system after a series of fits and starts that dates back almost 25 years. The current plan is to replace it with a health record system used by the US Department of Defense by 2031. "VA remains steadfast in its commitment to implementing a modernised, interoperable Federal [electronic health record] system to improve health care delivery and positively impact patient care," says VA press secretary Pete Kasperowicz. He says the system is already live at six VA sites and will be deployed at 19 out of 170 facilities by 2026.
Thank god that Windows 11 only needs about 3 minutes to boot up and 2 more to be usable after login in a corporate environment. How the times fly. /s
see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30505421
The article does not mention what OS is being used, but RT-11 was designed for "real-time" applications. That was released in 1973, so over 50 years ago.
I wonder if at some point virtualizing, and potentially adding a modern control layer on top of their current machines is a potential path forward.
The reality is that you need to keep upgrading and building new infrastructure. Because inevitably the old one won’t work or no longer be enough to support the needs of the users. And when that happens, it will be even more painful and expensive to get it up and running again. And the best case scenario would be that no one loses their lives over it.
Still in love with my Mac OS 10.6 (Snow Leopard) tax machine (offline).
I keep another machine of the same era (Intel Core2Duo) online with Win7Pro, for official paperwork/logins. Doesn't seem to be hacked / compromised, yet (what people usually say).
Also rocking modern Apple Silicon (M2Pro/3/4) which is impressive equipment, particularly considering their miniscule power usage. The current 15" MacBookAir will stream video for the majority of a day on a single charge, and from CostCo can be occassionally purchased for $849 (which includes an additional year of warranty).
> The only thing missing from Grigar's collection is a PC that reads five-and-a-quarter-inch floppy disks, she says. Despite their ubiquity, the machines are surprisingly hard to find. "I look on eBay, Craigslist, I have friends out looking for me, nothing. I've been looking for six years," she says. If you have one of these old computers lying around, and it still works, Grigar would love to hear from you.