- cross-posted to:
- mildlyinteresting@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- mildlyinteresting@lemmy.world
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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/
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.
there’s some older, rarely used CNC
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.
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.
There are third parties that create new software for old industrial machines for this exact reason.
At one of my old works we had a SMT machine allegedly built in 2012 which was running on XP. Worked flawlessly 🤷
I’m disturbed that an elevator is running a desktop OS. How did this happen? Did they never hear of microcontrollers?
Frighteningly, i worked as an admin at a hospitality wifi business that ran a windows box for dhcp duty. I would have to go o site, in the middle of the night, down to the basement of this hotel, and reboot the damn thing. It would die almost every week. Replaced with a linux server and never heard from them again.
I could tell you the stories of W95 & XP that runs the medical world…
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Right? If it still works then it still works.
If the article was talking about anything other than tech/software, we’d be praising its longevity.
I mean, you could read the article. Many users are unhappy with the performance or reliability.
And a lot of people are actually stuck because the Windows XP/7 machine is attached to industrial equipment that costs an unbelievable amount of money or is just impossible to replace.
It really depends what its used for.
Anything that is public facing would never work without constant maintenance and upgrades, be it a computer OS or some complex piece of hardware.
Yup, also especially for industrial applications, requirements and needs absolutely can change, and that means having to work around the equipment. I have seen firsthand the experience of trying to get new features into ancient applications. (Made worse by the fact that we took on support for it because the original company which had created the program had gone under).
And now you got a virus and it doesn’t work anymore.
You can protect yourself from that with airgapping and backups. The bigger issue is probably that it’s becoming increasingly hard to source parts for such old hardware.
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)
=Let(), Lambda and Regex were good additions to Excel imo
Whoa I had no idea of those functions. I just checked the documentation and I already know a hundred places I could use those.
Everything beyond the Dewey decimal system is/was pretty unnecessary, imo. We created a way to organize and “quickly” locate information stored in a physical format.
The near complete lack of manual labor has had many long reaching effects on society.
I type this on my brand new flagship phone…
I’ve been trying tk get family to switch to Linux, but some are irrationally attached to MS Word. I wonder if Office 2003 will run in Wine?
I’ve had success with Office 2010 under Wine.
https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iId=18487
I’ve heard LibreOffice has settings that make it look like Word
The elevator was running Windows XP.
Clearly an extreme case of overengineering. A elevator has no business running more than a few microcontrollers.
It’s probably only the screen component that is running an old version of embedded windows.
Screen? In a elevator?
How else are you gonna show ads?
I hate that you are right.
Yes? That is not that unusual and it is mentioned in the third sentence of the article.
As I rode up to the 14th floor, my eyes were drawn to a screen built into the side of the lift.
Those screens can easily run on an integrated Raspberry Pi microcontroller, they dont exactly have complex graphics
We are far away from the release of the Raspberry Pi if that screen is running an early version of Windows CE. Putting a PC in the elevator to drive the screen was probably the most cost effective solution.
Was but theres no reason to keep doing that
New ones probably use something newer. The 20 year old elevator in a hospital will only be upgraded if something breaks.
There’s not particularly good reason to stop doing it in that scenario either.
You have an offline technology stack in that elevator that has been doing the job correctly for 20 years. Why take on the expense and risk of changing things that aren’t currently broken?
It would be crazy if you are building new to resort to that stack, but for an established elevator, why bother?
Same for some old oscilloscopes at work. I’m not crazy about the choice but I can hardly suggest it would be practical to change it while the oscilloscopes still do their function.
I would say it’s a problem if the stack is online, but if it is self contained, the age of the software doesn’t make it a problem in and out itself.
In highrises with lots of stops and users, it uses some more advanced software to schedule the optimal stops, or distribute the load between multiple lifts. A similar concept exists for HDD controllers, where the read write arm must move to different positions to load data stored on different plates and sectors, and Repositioning the head is a slow and expensive process that cuts down the data transfer rate.
This requires little more than a 286. It’s an elevator. Responding in times measured in seconds. What kind of computations do you think are required here? Imaginary quaternion matrixes? Squared?
Yes, but if you have it as a Windows program it’s easier to configure on a screen with mouse and keyboard, change settings, display help files or give the source code to someone else to make changes or add features.
also it was probably not too expensive to grad a bog standard PC off the shelf and do it on that. I’ve see raspis in the wild doing tasks like that. and those will be outdated by the time they’re replaced too
Qube cinema servers only got off XP in 2015. They’re still on 7 though.
But how else can it book requests for priority access, and verify the credit card for whoever booked the elevator?
Ah, the blossoms of unimpeded, wild capitalism.
But how else can it be safe to connect to the internet?
You need to be on-site to fix it anyway, just access the debug port.
Good for them. If it works, it works. I wouldn’t connect it to the internet though.
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.
there’s a word for those people: awesome
windows xp was peak; running anything before xp is legendary
I ran Linux 1994ish. Amiga OS before. Amstrad CPC 464 before. A friend ran Sinclair ZX-80, that was the first system I had access to.
aside from radio shack and texas instruments that i used at camp, i think i was sadly too young to do anything but windows 3.1 :( our first computer was a tandy sensation in the early 90s and i didn’t really play with linux until maybe the mid 2000s
except for playing with apple IIe and radio shack computers through school and camp, that is.
TRS-80 and TI 99/4A presumably?
i’m pretttyyyyy sure this one is the one we had at camp :)
What luxury, it came with floppy drives!
I’d still be using Windows 7 if I could.
I mean, you can if you want to
It’s not safe and all that stuff.
Why do people keep repeating this tired propaganda? What exactly do you think will happen?
No1 rule in IT security: Keep shit updated.
Now I haven’t used windows other than managed work stuff for a decade but I would assume that the problem with the already existing nightmare of windows would be a lot worse if completely void of bugfixes.
But if you have an insight in to an entire field where the experts disagree on the subject I’m very keen on hearing it.
Very simple: I’m one user.
Do explain. How is that relevant to not getting bugfixes for your OS?
Where did I say not to get bugfixes for my OS, which is Windows 7?
MS DOS 6.6 for me - I enjoy the power of a 286 processor and much smaller instruction sets.
:O
Luxury. All I had was a 186.
with a 5.25 as A and B.!
Vic 20 here, I just like a green font
I’m one of the lucky ones with an 8086 that clearly saw the downgrade to 186.
AMD only just recently passed that with their 9000 series CPUs and Intel has only had better ones for a bit longer.
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.
Instead of using old proprietary shit you could use Linux or *BSD with a vintage desktop environment and have a blast
Something I noticed is that basic users (someone using a fucking 30 y/o OS is definitely one) have an easier time with *nix because most “technical” people are overfitted and brainwashed to the Micro$uck ecosystem
Dude, you clearly have no idea about proprietary and specialised hardware. Which is fine, but you’re choosing to attack people from your ignorance.
Don’t do that
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IBM still manufactures new mainframe computers and they will actually support your ancient mainframe from 1962 (assuming you’re still paying your licensing haha)
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the vast majority of Windows 7 and older computers that are still in production are attached to specialized hardware or industrial equipment. Stuff that costs many hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars.
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emulating older OSes doesn’t really solve the problem at all because the actual concern is security, not hardware issues.
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emulation isn’t perfect, especially with passthrough. Especially when you’re trying to pass through an ancient connector through a virtual adapter (show me a modern computer with SCSI)
I could keep going but that’s all I have enough care to do right now
Industrial emulation is easy to do, a sandboxed and controlled VM won’t die from hardware faults like a hunk of shit from 1993
Also there are NEW computers made specifically for this particular purpose, they even have ISA buses and shit
I don’t understand why lemmy is living in la la land, the moment you go against the narrative you’re brigaded to shit
Yes, y’all do be in fact wrong
Bonus: IBM sells emulation packages for migration to new architectures. IBM probably knows better than the lot of us.
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If a system is extremely old you can use Alpine Linux with no desktop environment
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.”
BART wrote a PDP8 cross assembler in the late 90s, that they still use today.
https://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/plucky/man1/palbart.1.html
I use a Windows XP machine for work nearly every day. And yeah, it’s because it runs some of the most expensive equipment in the company.
I 4 years ago I remotely reinstalled Wonderware and necessary drivers on a Windows NT3.51 HMI controlling a mango line in Africa (I don’t remember exactly, maybe Burkina?). Not fun, there wasn’t much documentation left.
One year later I had to do it again.
We’ve got multiple tools still on Windows 2000, happily running production. They’re on an airgapped network though, so no issues.
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?
Why would Windows 7 not be “safe” to connect to the internet? Do you understand how any of this works?
Lemmy is overloaded with people that puff up and want to present like they know things about tech, when they know basically nothing.
Get a hardware firewall, get basic safe practices in place, don’t do basic user operations as admin, and configure shit correctly. If you think that your OS is there to protect you, you are a tech foooooooooooooool
I just connected my Windows 7 machine to the internet and two Russians jumped out my serial port! One is holding me down while the other one is stealing the CPU from my washing machine! Send help!
I hope they aren’t the hackers known as 4chan!
Well one did fuck me in the ass while the other one stole my favorite underwear right out from the delicate cycle. Total animals.
Well see the problem is you didn’t hot glue the cereal and milk port shut dummie
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No, and that is saddly the standard these days. Its all just bullshit sales tatics and a weird take on what risks are and are not involved with legacy tech.
Like dude how am I supposed to order burgers through skip the dishes if I don’t have Windows 11 and a 64 core CPU with 256GB of DDR18 super RAM running terabytes of vibe-coded AI slop!???
Just slap some bit defender on it. That’s all that we have to do with windows 10 and we’re all good to go. Hey if Linux can run on the same box for all these years and be safe theres no reason why any windows system can’t be safe with a simple add on.
Windows 11 is just a tmp chip added to board
Srsly that is all. Something smaller than a thumb drive changed and they are trying to convince the world to make more waste. It’s fucking stupid. Microsoft can eat fat ass.
