I was an IT tech in college, and one of our biology professors had a stack of ancient computers in a closet specifically because the electron microscope in his lab had to have a computer as a controller connected to it that ran Windows 3.1 and which had extremely specific hardware specs. He’d Frankenstein them together as parts quit, and was always on the lookout for this very specific computer on eBay. I had to get his microscope back running once by installing Windows and the controller software on the “new” computer, and it was actually really enjoyable. Brought back a ton of memories. But yeah, he is just buying time until his perfectly good microscope quits working all because he ran out of parts.
I had a similar experience but in a big aerospace company (~1500 persons on the site where I was working).
The system to create and edit work instructions was only running on old UNIX workstations. It was in 2015.
Out of curiosity which computer was this?
Compaq or Dell. Similar situation with microscopes. They required FireWire to work.
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A really old Compaq, don’t remember the specific model
We have a very expensive engraver at our shop, probably to the tune of idk, $20-30 thousand. It’s a pretty large, heavy machine. We use it all day long for identification tags on cabinet doors, push button tags, serial ID tags. Absolutely critical to our business and the company that made it went out of business so if the windows 7 laptop that has the software ever dies, it becomes useless.
Shouldn’t it be possible to image the drive and deploy it on another laptop?
That’s probably a good idea. A decent amount of old programs can be run on modern equipment if you can create a good disk image and get it virtualized. There’s some edge cases with figuring out I/O and getting timing to work correctly, but I’d say most old tech can be made to work with a reasonable amount of effort.
If over $10k is on the line, there’s almost no reason to not at least try if you can afford the downtime.
I used to work at an airport and they had a internal tracking system for passengers with special requests (mostly for unaccompanied kids).
Anyway it’s programmed in assembly and only works on one particular type computer. Even if it runs on a different era appropriate processor apparently this app won’t work. So there was a buttload of old motherboards in a store room somewhere so that we could just swap the board out if the computer ever died. It’s critical infrastructure that there is no backup for.
So basically I’m pretty sure the way the world ends is because somebody threw away an important floppy disk, and now a nuclear reactor is going into meltdown.
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You can sell it to a Makerspace or just toss on a new main board. Engravers, lasers, CNC machines, mills, etc all operate on the same fundamental principles.
LinuxCNC or Marlin work with practically every piece of hardware that you can imagine. Stepper motors/drivers have 4 wires each. Once you figure out which is which, just plug them into a Beagleboard or something similar, load up the software, and you’re good to go. Often with far more capabilities and accuracy.
Plus you keep more tech waste out of landfills.
Well, that’s… not smart. Maintaining Win95 on actual hardware and implying they’d lose the data if those ancient pieces of crap went down? Big yikes. One thing is “how did you not virtualize this 10+ years ago”, but man, backups??
You can’t virtualize it because you need to physically plug in the hardware, and backups are useless if you can’t read the files without the Win95 software.
You can connect VMs to physical ports. We use a Win XP VM to connect through a USB to serial converter to get data from devices 30+ years old. You can make and use backups because the VM can run the original software.
Some lab equip has proprietary ports that would need reverse engineering to make and use a USB adapter.
That’s fair, I read virtualize as “cloud/hardware far away” and not “local physical machine with a VM on it”.
At the risk of sounding like an old man yelling at a cloud, does anyone ever wonder whether humanity is just moving too fast sometimes?
Centuries of slow, gradual, non-linear progress. Then the industrial revolution, electrification, computers, the Internet. The past couple hundred years have had incredible and ever-accelerating progress that has drastically improved our understanding of all sorts of sciences. You can find all sorts of global stats that show how humanity has benefitted from this time. But there have been drawbacks. Pollution and environmental destruction, climate change, rampant capitalism and exploitation. And now we have AI on the horizon: will it upend society or go the way of 3D TV? Are we at the point where we need to cool off “innovation” and take more time to figure out the things that we already have?
And I think that applies to much lower-stakes technology like what’s referenced in this post too. Looking at videogames: there were huge advances from 8-bit to 16-bit. From 2D to 3D. From CD to DVD. The jump from PS3 to PS4 and 360 to Xbone was still noticeable, but not huge. But did we really need a PS5 and Xbox Series? The Switch is definitely past it’s prime, but is the rumored 2028 PS6 really going to be necessary? The jump from 1080p to 4k is nice, but nowhere near as significant as the previous ones. I can’t imagine 8k ever becoming more than a niche application. Higher frame rates are nice, but I think anything higher than 120FPS is the same as 8K: always reserved for niche and enthusiast use cases.
Or you can look at phones. The market is finally slowing down, but for a while phones were only built to last 2 years. To the point where they stopped making user-removable batteries, and they’ve even stopped including SD cards on a lot of models. I have several old HTC and LG phones that are just as functional as when I bought them, but they can’t handle web browsing and most apps are no longer compatible with their operating systems. I could jump through hoops to install something like LineageOS, but that’s relying on a community of volunteers to help to circumvent the restrictions put in place by manufacturers who do not even make phones anymore.
How many different storage formats existed in all of history prior to 1900? Maybe a dozen? How many have been retired since then? Laser disc, 8-track, VHS, cassette, wax cylinders. Vinyl came, went, and has kind of come back again. CD’s peaked in the early 2000’s and are a fraction of what they used to be. Best Buy and Sal-Mart are going to stop selling DVD’s and Blu-Rays next year. Floppy drives have disappeared from computers, and internal optical drives are almost wiped out. Cars are replacing CD’s with Bluetooth and streaming services.
Humanity seems to be moving towards all science and culture being stored on the servers for a handful of huge corporations. All our science and culture at the whim of a billionaire. Library budgets are under attack. Copyright laws get more and more draconian, to the point where even saying something about an IP that it’s owner doesn’t like can result in that content being stricken from all but the most niche platforms.
I applaud organizations like Wikipedia and Archive.org, and of course all of the pirates out there. I’m trying to personally hoard enough physical media to satisfy myself through my lifetime. But it all just seems like a battle humanity is destined to lose with itself.
Honestly maintaining or figuring out a migration method for these dinosaur systems would be my ideal job. I just love tinkering with these relics of the past but have no idea where to find this kind of work
Right above you: https://lemmy.ml/comment/5635116
There are companies that still sell new machines of archaic operating systems for this reason. I’d really recommend anyone in the situation of justletmeremember to look into it, all that stuff could be backed up and given redundancies pretty inexpensively considering the risk.
And yeah, it’s really common. There is way more horrifying applications than research that rely on legacy machines. Everyone has heard that nuclear weapons required floppy disks until very recently, but it wasn’t some isolated case. Stuff like that is all over the military despite the insane amount of money it steals.
Cries in I just wanna play Landscape but “online only” that the pulled the plug on after like 3 months. Thanks Daybreak.
I’m okay with this.
/s
I just got a 5 figure check for two weeks of work reverse engineering proprietary protocols for a super high end centrifuge.
Geeze, scientists! How hard is it to rip apart the hardware, hook up a JTAG debugger, attach an oscilloscope to various PCB traces, capture the data (praying to Linus that it’s a switched protocol), find what might be some documentation from a sketchy Slavic website, call an ex who speaks Russian and have them translate, then reimplement the drivers in a modern operating system with modern realtime kernel modules.
It ain’t
bathysphererocket surgery!You know, getting upset about this kind of thing with gaming was enough anger for me already.
