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German railway seeks IT admin to manage MS-DOS and Windows 3.11 systems (www.techspot.com)

submitted 9 months ago by throws_lemy@lemmy.nz to c/technology@lemmy.world

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[–] Dasnap@lemmy.world 26 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (3 children)

Isn't pretty much all airport scheduling based off software from the 80s or something?

Edit: Found a video about it.

[–] freebee@sh.itjust.works 6 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Why change what isn't broken, right?

[–] lolcatnip@reddthat.com 8 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

I've worked in that area. It was broken back in the 90s and I doubt the crusty old parts of the system have gotten any better. I was tasked with writing a more modern wrapper for part of the legacy system, and when I asked for documentation I was told they had literally nothing to give me.

I was just an intern at the time so maybe someone with more clout could have gotten sometime to dig in a forgotten closet for old technical docs, but it still strikes me as a very bad sign when technical docs for a system every agent uses all day every day aren't immediately available on the company's intranet.

[–] Dasnap@lemmy.world 8 points 9 months ago (2 children)

That's the thing though, it is.

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[–] freebee@sh.itjust.works 1 points 9 months ago

Oof.

[–] clay_pidgin@sh.itjust.works 6 points 9 months ago

Probably! APOLLO and SABRE and stuff look ancient.

[–] toofpic@lemmy.world 1 points 9 months ago

I know for sure several airports are using OpenVMS, and there are more we don't know about, as some companies keep running yheir stuff for decades not asking anyone for support.
And I'm sure There are multiple other old systems out there, it's too hard to replace them.
And they work! Our VMS stuff runs great, it's fast, and the uptime is measured in decades sometimes. So the problem is hardware: we rolled out the first production x86 version this year, so our users are fine (it's still an issue of porting your software, but it's not as terrible as building everything from scratch), but before that OpenVMS could run on Itanium servers at latest, and the platform was dying off since the beginning of 2000s, so it is a problem to find a normal replacement machine now.