This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
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. 🤷♂️
My dad's company still runs software from 2002 for recording sales and sending bills. Runs fine on Windows 10 surprisingly
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
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
That's what I think too. And then I see "Their systems are built into everything around us", which basically only applies to PCs and laptops. What is built into pretty much everything around us, is GnuLinux.
I'm disturbed that an elevator is running a desktop OS. How did this happen? Did they never hear of microcontrollers?
My assumption would be that the display is not related to operating the elevator, but rather displaying information about businesses on the respective floors. I've seen those a fair few times, and since they run on isolated networks or even fully local, there's little risk.
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...
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)
“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.
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
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.
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.”
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.
MS DOS 6.6 for me - I enjoy the power of a 286 processor and much smaller instruction sets.
:O
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.
there's a word for those people: awesome
windows xp was peak; running anything before xp is legendary
We've got multiple tools still on Windows 2000, happily running production. They're on an airgapped network though, so no issues.
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).
"stuck" more like happy to not have to deal with the last 15-ish years of microsoft ruining everything they previously excelled at.
