Still booting after all these years: The people stuck using ancient Windows computers

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• Pistcow@lemm.ee ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  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.

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  • lupusblackfur@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    😂 🤣

    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. 🤷‍♂️

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    • vaionko@sopuli.xyz ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      My dad’s company still runs software from 2002 for recording sales and sending bills. Runs fine on Windows 10 surprisingly

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• shalafi@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  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.

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  • Retrograde@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    I binge people doing this type of thing on YouTube lol. I miss working in the industry

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  • drasglaf@sh.itjust.works ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    If you ever see yourself in the need of information about the DOS era again, Vogons is the place to go IMHO.

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    • AnUnusualRelic@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      But it’s all in poetry, unfortunately.

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  • Blackmist@feddit.uk ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    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.

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  • xavier666@lemm.ee ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    The cause of death was clear, PSU fan died, killed itself from heat.

    PSU: “Release…me…from this mockery called life”

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• oxf@sh.itjust.works ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  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.

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  • undrwater@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    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.

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    • shalafi@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      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.

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    • guy_threepwood@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      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 theregister.com/…/opensourcing_of_winamp_goes_bad…

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    • Broken@lemmy.ml ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      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.

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  • catloaf@lemm.ee ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    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.

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    • cmnybo@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      You can get industrial grade CF cards that use SLC memory. They have much better write endurance than normal CF cards.

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  • IsoKiero@sopuli.xyz ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    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 equipment which working just fine.

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    • Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      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.

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    • oxf@sh.itjust.works ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      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.

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  • stoy@lemmy.zip ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    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.

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    • jdnewmil@lemmy.ca ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      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.

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    • jaybone@lemmy.zip ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      lol what drawing program?

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  • BombOmOm@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Yeah, and as long as these things never touch the internet, there really isn’t an issue.

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  • muusemuuse@lemm.ee ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    There are third parties that create new software for old industrial machines for this exact reason.

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  • imetators@lemm.ee ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    At one of my old works we had a SMT machine allegedly built in 2012 which was running on XP. Worked flawlessly 🤷

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• Fiivemacs@lemmy.ca ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Stuck or preferred choice?

  Trapped using software they needed to buy once, vs rent?

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  • LorIps@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    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.

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  • Cocodapuf@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    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 :-(

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    • LorIps@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      www.fedoraproject.org linuxmint.com archlinux.org www.debian.org elementary.io 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.

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• 0x0@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  I’m disturbed that an elevator is running a desktop OS. How did this happen? Did they never hear of microcontrollers?

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  • viking@infosec.pub ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    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.

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  • Thrawne@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    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.

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  • Valmond@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    I could tell you the stories of W95 & XP that runs the medical world…

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• hperrin@lemmy.ca ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  “Stuck”

  Imagine being stuck using something that works for 30 years.

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  • MurrayL@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    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.

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    • Damage@feddit.it ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      I mean, you could read the article. Many users are unhappy with the performance or reliability.

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    • ByteJunk@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      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.

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  • Nenutzerbame@feddit.org ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    And now you got a virus and it doesn’t work anymore.

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    • SpaceCadet@feddit.nl ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      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.

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• lmuel@sopuli.xyz ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  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)

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  • funkless_eck@sh.itjust.works ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    =Let(), Lambda and Regex were good additions to Excel imo

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  • Twitchy1@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    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…

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  • gamer@lemm.ee ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    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?

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    • MrRazamataz@lemmy.razbot.xyz ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      I’ve had success with Office 2010 under Wine.

      appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version…

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    • Feathercrown@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      I’ve heard LibreOffice has settings that make it look like Word

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• MonkderVierte@lemmy.ml ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  The elevator was running Windows XP.

  Clearly a extreme case of overengineering. An elevator has no business running more than a few microcontrollers.

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  • e8d79@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    It’s probably only the screen component that is running an old version of embedded windows.

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    • jjlinux@lemmy.ml ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      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.

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    • MonkderVierte@lemmy.ml ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Screen? In a elevator?

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  • perviouslyiner@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    But how else can it book requests for priority access, and verify the credit card for whoever booked the elevator?

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    • MonkderVierte@lemmy.ml ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Ah, the blossoms of unregulated wild capitalism.

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  • GenosseFlosse@feddit.org ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    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.

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    • HugeNerd@lemmy.ca ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      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?

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  • Taleya@aussie.zone ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Qube cinema servers only got off XP in 2015. They’re still on 7 though.

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  • HugeNerd@lemmy.ca ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    But how else can it be safe to connect to the internet?

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    • MonkderVierte@lemmy.ml ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      You need to be on-site to fix it anyway, just access the debug port.

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• Jimmycakes@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  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 machines going

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  • Krudler@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    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.

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  • Mpatch@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Yes i still use floppy disks regularly for my cnc plasma table

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• Treczoks@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  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.

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• njordomir@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Good for them. If it works, it works. I wouldn’t connect it to the internet though.

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• theywilleatthestars@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  I’d still be using Windows 7 if I could.

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  • the_trash_man@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    I mean, you can if you want to

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    • isVeryLoud@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      It’s not safe and all that stuff.

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• shalafi@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  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 out there is going to be able to attack them. Security through obscurity indeed!

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  • Blemgo@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    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.

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    • Doom@ttrpg.network ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      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.

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• cupcakezealot@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  there’s a word for those people: awesome

  windows xp was peak; running anything before xp is legendary

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• neon_nova@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  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.

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• KulunkelBoom@lemm.ee ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  MS DOS 6.6 for me - I enjoy the power of a 286 processor and much smaller instruction sets. :O

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• jubilationtcornpone@sh.itjust.works ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  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.

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• vivendi@programming.dev ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  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

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• PeteWheeler@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  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?

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• lka1988@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  We’ve got multiple tools still on Windows 2000, happily running production. They’re on an airgapped network though, so no issues.

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• Retrograde@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  I would totally hang with that lady in the thumbnail lol

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• the_riviera_kid@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  “stuck” more like happy to not have to deal with the last 15-ish years of microsoft ruining everything they previously excelled at.

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• Halcyon@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Why not? Still using Windows 7 on one of my ThinkPads. It’s a solid system, if you know what your doing and how to use is safely.

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• shalafi@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  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.

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• Kolanaki@pawb.social ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  If not for DX10 and above not even existing on it, afaik, I’d still be using XP.

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• einlander@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  The dot net framework was ported to Windows 95/98 so they can use more software now.

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• the_q@lemm.ee ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  If it serves your needs then more power to them. Tech companies today more than ever make sure you keep buying.

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• twice_hatch@midwest.social ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Stuck?

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• bluewing@lemm.ee ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  I had a 486DX running DOS for writing and editing CAM programs for CNC mills, lathes, pipe bender, and a laser cutter. And for funsies, an even older Macintosh that booted from a 5 1/4" floppy that ran a CMM, (co-ordinate measuring machine). And the software for the CMM ran from another 5 1/4" floppy.

  This was about 2017 before I retired as a toolmaker.

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• LoveSausage@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Nuclear silos… is that early dos system I believe?

  As long as things are not connected and not trying to add newer stuff , what’s the problem?

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