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.
😂 🤣
Similarly, my Dad ran his medical office on Win98 until he died (2011).
Of course, he had no support for OS or the medical office software other than himself (and me).
Had a supplier of inexpensive old machines/parts.
All cause he refused to pay the $5k required to upgrade the medical office software that ran on those machines. 🤷♂️
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.
I binge people doing this type of thing on YouTube lol. I miss working in the industry
If you ever see yourself in the need of information about the DOS era again, Vogons is the place to go IMHO.
But it’s all in poetry, unfortunately.
The cause of death was clear, PSU fan died, killed itself from heat.
PSU: “Release…me…from this mockery called life”
Man, remember when people used to break into offices to steal the RAM?
My work experience in around 1995 was spent at a local computer firm.
At one point a group of men in balaclavas showed up, the boss stopped playing Doom long enough to cover the security camera and hand over a bunch of crumpled banknotes, and I was handed this pile of SIMMs to put in a test rig to make sure they were OK to sell.
I also had to straighten the pins on used/stolen 486 CPUs, and pretty sure at one point was taken to break into a warehouse. There was certainly nobody else in the whole building, and we loaded the van with a bunch of cheap looking boxes before taking them back to HQ.
The boss was also banging a girl in my class, which in later years I learned makes him a paedo. Times sure were simpler in 1995.
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.
That idea often comes up in these discussions and I’ve never really had an argument against. Best I got is that parts of that software may have moved to more modern stuff that was purchased by another company. But that’s a damned thin excuse not to implement this.
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/
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.
I set up a 32 bit Windows 7 VM so my dad could keep using his old drawing program that was built for Windows 3.11.
It was the last version of Windows to support 3.11 compabillity.
Works well.
Just a note: Windows software for controlling hardware is highly likely to assume a)direct access to the hardware (sometimes mediated thorough ancient APIs and assuming the existence of defunct expansion slots) and b) assume meatspace time can be counted using OS timing ticks (which get stretched out as modern VMs timeshare with other processes underneath the virtulized hardware). It is awfully tough to replace them sometimes.
Yeah, I suspect you gotta do something similar to what McLaren did when the special mid 90s computer they used for the F1 got too hard to replace as they broke, they built a new computer interface that was compatible with modern computers and allowed them to interface with the car
lol what drawing program?
Macrografx Designer 3.1:
There are third parties that create new software for old industrial machines for this exact reason.
Yeah, and as long as these things never touch the internet, there really isn’t an issue.
At one of my old works we had a SMT machine allegedly built in 2012 which was running on XP. Worked flawlessly 🤷
Stuck or preferred choice?
Trapped using software they needed to buy once, vs rent?
Yes, stuck. There are enourmous problems with different institutions having to use ancient PCs because the software doesn’t work on modern ones, be they electron microscopes, hospitals or industrial machinery, causing e.g. enourmous security issues. This is one of the most important reasons why FOSS and why making FOSS software mandatory in government contracts is so important.
Also how come people can’t read the fucking article before commenting?
I’m a bit depressed that I finally need to upgrade my last windows 7 machine. It looks like it’s 10 for me now :-(
https://www.fedoraproject.org/ https://linuxmint.com/ https://archlinux.org/ https://www.debian.org/ https://elementary.io/ https://system76.com/pop/
There are many safe open source options. If you need help there are ample resources available. If you want to you can also DM me.
Yeah, I’m well aware. But how much of my time would it take to get a bunch of windows software running smoothly on Linux?
I do appreciate the offer of personal help, that’s an extremely generous offer to an internet stranger. Sincerely, thank you!
Depends on what software. Anything that happens in the browser works. A lot of other software can be run using Wine. There is some software which still has problems especially when using USB ports as serial ports etc. and a lot of subpar software (un)fortunately just doesn’t work because of it being badly programmed.
Check if there’s alternatives to what you use in Windows, or if there’s a Linux version. Decide if you need to use the windows program, or if the Linux equivalent will work. There may be a learning curve to using a different program, but I haven’t yet really found anything that doesn’t have an equivalent that isn’t a program paired with hardware that will only work with each other.
“Stuck”
Imagine being stuck using something that works for 30 years.
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.
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
Yeah man. Details are going to be fuzzy here, but I think it was only in recent memory where Boeing upgraded the planes in Japan to no longer need floppy disks.
Yes i still use floppy disks regularly for my cnc plasma table
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.
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.
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 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.
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?
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!
Idk, it was horrendously insecure, would freeze a lot, and missing creature comforts like window tiling.
Tbh I think you’re letting nostalgia blind you to XP’s flaws a little.
If they kept refining Win7 it would’ve been great.
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.
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.
For a business sure.
You wanna hack my dnd campaign and some pictures of my cock? Sure whatever dude. All financial and important shit goes through my phone anyway and that’s likely to be hacked from the institutions I use.
They’ll infect it and make it part of their DDoS bot swarm.
While that is awful and sucks. Again, probably won’t really target me
If China or America use my machine as a member of their DDoS bot swarm likely I probably couldn’t even fight back as much as I’d like. Either one of those countries could have backdoor bullshit into any system you think of.
If it is a nefarious third party maybe I want them to use my computer to attack the financial system of these capitalist regimes or to harm the infrastructure of an oppressive government.
Again, have my cock and dnd campaign. If my system runs slow and annoys me guess I’ll deal with it. They already will get my information from the millions of sources compiling and collecting it.
I dunno doesn’t really make me shake in my boots
This is short-sighted. It also reeks of “Fuck you, I got mine!” I know that’s not your intention. I just think you haven’t thought super hard about it. I was the same with privacy concerns.
So let me throw some edge cases at you.
You remember the network time protocol vulnerability that was used to power botnets for a little bit? Well, until everyone upgraded their shit, service providers had to just block IP ranges of compromised machines until enough machines in that block stopped DDoS’ing them.
So what happens when some script kiddy pays for time on the botnet, which includes your box, to smash Wizards while you’re trying to look things up? Or what if someone uses your box as a jump box to go attack some giant corporation, and shit gets traced back to you? Or what if someone decides you’re the unlucky one where their whole goal is to dominate your entire home network, and they get your phone when it’s on your home wifi?
Some might be surprised how many systems are still running on AS400s. IBM still makes and maintains IBMi, the modern iteration. My last company wrote our flagship product for these machines, all green screen. Our customers would sometimes move to our GUI product and jump right back to the prompt menus. Hey, if you gotta move fast and have a bulletproof system, text menus are the only way to fly!
By my god, the skill set for running and programming those beasts touches on almost nothing I’ve learned in 30+ years of IT work. Wish I had got experience in that part of the company, seen some solid job posts for that sorta tech.
I worked in the airline industry for years and learned a GUI overlay for one system and another entirely green screen system called SHARES (see if you can guess the airline). Honestly I kind of enjoyed working with those systems; there’s some refreshing “back to basics” feeling kind of like driving a manual transmission.
In my current job I’ve been using another legacy system. Well, my job was to create a relatively modern service for the legacy system to call, but none of the remaining developers knew how to use the extensions of that system that does SOAP calls. So I had to learn just enough of that legacy system to hold their hands through the parts that call my service. Kind of fun, to be honest!
SOAP calls
Now that’s a name I’ve not heard in a long time.
I worked with an AS400 while in vehicle logistics, those things are optimized for simple functions but high data throughput
If not for DX10 and above not even existing on it, afaik, I’d still be using XP. That was the best iteration until they forcibly made you have to upgrade if you played games (especially if you wanted to play Halo on PC).
especially if you wanted to play Halo on PC
I still giggle that after years and years of Halo 3+ being a console exclusive, and Halo 2 sucking on Windows for years*, the entire Halo collection now has a Gold rating on Linux. I have very specific memories of being annoyed for years that the most prestigious Microsoft game doesn’t work on a Microsoft gaming platform (Windows).
*God damn does Games for Windows Live suck
