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
this post was submitted on 18 May 2025
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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
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.
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?
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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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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I'd still be using Windows 7 if I could.
The elevator was running Windows XP.
Clearly an extreme case of overengineering. A elevator has no business running more than a few microcontrollers.
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.
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.
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
It's probably only the screen component that is running an old version of embedded windows.
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MS DOS 6.6 for me - I enjoy the power of a 286 processor and much smaller instruction sets.
:O
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