141–150 of 165 posts
When I worked for a major pharma company in the mid-to-late 2000s, their entire security system (IE, the door badge ACLs) was run on an old vaxstation that had its own full rack. It worked, they said.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sounds like a nice, no-frills tool that does its job!
It was meant to be a temporary solution until the online payments module was developed by the vendor. Yet, here we are in 2020 and that module still hasn't been delivered. And no one who worked there initially is even around any longer. If I'm not mistaken, we even gave them our code back in 2009 or 2010.
s/for now/forever
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I worry how companies will be able to provide similar services in the future, as more and more stuff is running as services in the cloud. It’ll most likely become more and more costly, as you won’t be able to buy offline version of some complement, and keep it working on your support device for 30 years. You’ll need to build all of them yourself. And that will also most likely mean it’ll be less reliable.
Lol. Aircraft software running "in the cloud". Damb right it will. It will also work "in the rain" and "in the snow".
i'm surprised that people are surprised by this. i work for aerospace, and this is fairly typical -- albeit not floppy disk examples, but we keep a bunch of old laptops running win 7 and other examples around, hound around for them and spare parts. these machines are off the network, etc. these systems were developed 20+ years ago and per contract the a manufacture is obligated to maintain them for the service life,…
It is interesting that people don't think on these scales. What percentage of the HN crowd has developed something that has had (or will have) a 10, 20 or 40 year life span? Because I've seen a bit of that and it's what makes the world go round. There's certainly a lot of bad/crazy stuff out there but wonder if the ephemeral fashions of today will stand the tests of time.
The Panavia Tornado fighter jet famously used cassette tapes for mission data. I guess aircraft are a product of their time and because of stringent safety requirements why try to update something if it works fine?
Yep, same for the F-14... "...Then there was the computing power on the aircraft—or lack thereof. It was a Commodore 64 with wings on it ...For example: the mission computer loaded off of magnetic tape. That magnetic-tape computer had so little memory that its crew had to switch programs depending on what the jet was doing at the moment—the RIO would hit a switch to bring up the bombing program, and then after the bo…
It was very old so, yes, I'm sure it had plenty of limitation though.
While this probably wouldn't pass muster with whoever certifies the 747's avionics, over in the retrocomputing world the solution to "It only uses floppies" has been the cheap Gotek floppy emulators that read from a USB stick running this free firmware: https://github.com/keirf/FlashFloppy It has a great number of hardware mods that give it a display and a rotary encoder for better disk selection: https://github.com/…
Not surprising at all, and not really a problem either provided it works. More modern aircraft use things like USB sticks but often with old file formats and they can’t use a stick bigger than 2GB (actually hard to find if you want to buy one). Aviation engineering vastly prefers “old but works” over “new and fancy” and this article is just one detailed example of that.
I get why prefer old but works over new and fancy, but what about new and works? They could trial new technology for five or ten years in parallel with the old before switching gaining both the stability of old and proven and the future-proof-ness of "new and we think it will stick but it might not". The reason why it isn't done this way is probably cost, but at what point will the difficulty of sourcing the old tech…
Did it work? Yes. Was it secure? Yes. So, what's the problem? Updating 30-year-old gear with media from its era seems to make sense. If they were really wedded to digital media and needed to bridge that gap, Sony used to make a floppy disk that you could jam a memory stick into and it would read in a normal 3½ inch floppy drive. Very cool gadget.
Frankly, provided you have error checking logic and don't store them next to a magnet... floppy disks are pretty damn bulletproof. I've had way more issues per-use reading a thumb drive or a CD/DVD-ROM than I ever did reading floppy disks.
i'm surprised that people are surprised by this. i work for aerospace, and this is fairly typical -- albeit not floppy disk examples, but we keep a bunch of old laptops running win 7 and other examples around, hound around for them and spare parts. these machines are off the network, etc. these systems were developed 20+ years ago and per contract the a manufacture is obligated to maintain them for the service life,…
It is interesting that people don't think on these scales. What percentage of the HN crowd has developed something that has had (or will have) a 10, 20 or 40 year life span? Because I've seen a bit of that and it's what makes the world go round. There's certainly a lot of bad/crazy stuff out there but wonder if the ephemeral fashions of today will stand the tests of time.
i'm surprised that people are surprised by this. i work for aerospace, and this is fairly typical -- albeit not floppy disk examples, but we keep a bunch of old laptops running win 7 and other examples around, hound around for them and spare parts. these machines are off the network, etc. these systems were developed 20+ years ago and per contract the a manufacture is obligated to maintain them for the service life,…
Maybe I misunderstood something, but do you really need some specific, old hardware to run win 7? I thought you are going to say DOS or something older than win 98.