51–60 of 82 posts
There are a lot of 1960s minicomputers running factories and power stations out there. Do you want to close down a major power plant to install a PC based replacement and hope that it works first time?
not currently using for production because after staying up all night updating and deleting old backups, I forgot to bring it where I was going :(
At my first job some extremely expensive piece of spectrometry equipment was controlled by a Compaq Deskpro 386 (c. 1986). I left at the beginning of 2005 and it wouldn't surprise me if the Deskpro is still there.
That does not surprise me one bit, those old dekspros were nearly indestructible. I've seen one be pulled off a table in a warehouse by someone tripping over a cord, the case dented the concrete floor but the compaq never blinked. Amazing hardware. I think that's the line that really cemented the compaq = solid in people's heads. They also weighed quite a bit.
Both computers were solid as hell.
He definitely had a habit of buying insanely expensive computers and then using them forever. He had an old Dell 386 that eventually got a huge SCSI enclosure that he used as his primary machine for close to ten years (my mom had a matching one that lasted even longer). When he got a 1-meter tall dual Pentium Pro tower from Micron, he just set it up at the the other end of his 12ft desk and kept using both. He kept using that thing for another 5 years until he got a dual P4 Xeon with Rambus memory, which then lasted another 8 years (he only replaced it last year!).
This showed up here a while back and is also an interesting read: http://fosspatents.blogspot.com/2010/08/western-civilization...
Sometimes in all my eagerness to keep up and constantly re-educate myself on a daily basis I forget that there are still a lot of very, very old systems out there.
I have no idea how old the systems are behind this data point but it seems relevant nonetheless: there are apparently 200-300 billion lines of COBOL still in production : http://www.enterpriseinnovation.net/content/how-should-gover... This showed up here a while back and is also an interesting read: http://fosspatents.blogspot.com/2010/08/western-civilization... Sometimes in all my eagerness to keep up and constantly…
TRS-80 Model 100 laptop (with an RS-232 connection) for our security panel. I might as well claim my trophy now. Where is it? Edit: We also have several SPARC Classics running some pre-2.5.1 version that are doing phone switch stuff.
Oh, and here is your trophy ;) :
\ oldest /
\ hw /
\ /
\ /
-----
/ \
We have the same VME crate running the telescope drive motors that was put in when the place was built in the early 80s. There are a lot of 1960s minicomputers running factories and power stations out there. Do you want to close down a major power plant to install a PC based replacement and hope that it works first time?
This will probably sound weird but I actually feel better with that 1960's stuff in there even if the PC based replacement would work the first time.
If only because I think that it wouldn't last. PCs are built using cheap components, even the industrial ones. It's very hard to even find a power supply that will last more than a few years. And anything with a 'regular' fan on it is immediately suspect.