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Amiga runs Michigan schools' heating and air conditioning systems (2015)

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Re: Amiga runs Michigan schools' heating and air conditioning systems (2015)

#71

Post by Sunspark »

tshaddox wrote: post #65
Sunspark wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If programming it was a school project for an 80s kid, might as well try to make its replacement a school project for a 20s kid. If a kid did it back then, the integration can't be that hard. You need to find a decision-maker to agree to the liability of letting some kid implement a system today. What if something goes wrong and all the children roast alive or something? Then the parents would sue. It'll never happ…

> What if something goes wrong and all the children roast alive or something? Then the parents would sue. It'll never happen today, people are terrified of being wrong so no is always the easiest answer. I guess I sometimes agree with this sentiment, but this seems like an inappropriate place to invoke it. Is it really so insanely risk averse to get professional HVAC people to install and maintain the HVAC system for…

If you mean in the past, this setup was probably state of the art back in the 80s. Multiple buildings networked together? Doubt that there were many HVAC guys setting that up back then.

If you mean today, sure, but why replace something that has worked so reliably without fail?

Re: Amiga runs Michigan schools' heating and air conditioning systems (2015)

#72

Post by paulmd »

doobiedowner wrote: post #33
jhallenworld wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe replace it with LoRa... but what device is in each building? I doubt you have to update the heating/cooling systems, they are likely just relay closures. Also each school is probably on the net these days, so replace with some Wifi IOT device. Or Samsung "Smart Things".. but unlikely to last 30 years..

>they are likely just relay closures. You get it, yup. >Also each school is probably on the net these days, so replace with some Wifi IOT device. What I use are Ethernet to Bacnet gateways. Each building gets a gateway device with Bacnet nodes connected over a serial daisy chain. If the HVAC device isn't networkable, serial devices do the relay flipping. IT folks get the data into different applications. Integration…

Schools are often very challenging RF environments, my uni wifi was constantly overloaded as fuck, even the newly built engineering campus was not great. And they ran a decent amount of APs, but there was also a fuckload of people there on wifi all the time, because lol engineering campus.

Assumptions about IoT availability in terms of bluetooth/BTLE or 2.4/5GHz might be challenging for sure. Especially inside whatever HVAC metal/concrete cage etc (just run ethernet). Still though I mean it's running on a legacy UHF (?) system right now.

There are some industrial ISM bands at like 900 MHz or 432 MHz or something, and you can get modem boards that run on that. The 432 MHz aren't too fast but you just need to send "thermostat X turn on" and get a confirmation back. Which probably should be signed commands so some some yahoo can't have fun with the thermostat, even on this system, hopefully. But still, in a lot of cases probably a commodity solution would work.

Re: Amiga runs Michigan schools' heating and air conditioning systems (2015)

#73

Post by anyfoo »

Sunspark wrote: post #63
anyfoo wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That 80s Amiga is probably incredibly reliable and robust with its real multi-tasking OS and doesn't require "security patches". I generally agree with some of your comment, but this sentence confuses me a bit. I'd argue that the only reason that it does not require security patches is because it's not attached to any network. Though, probably the only actual reason would be that nobody is looking too closely at th…

I am sure someone else can explain it better, but basically in the 80s you mostly only had a choice of 8-bit computers (like Apple, C64, etc.), DOS, Macs, Atari ST and Amiga. The 8-bit machines weren't really networking compatible or powerful enough to do more than 1 thing at a time (128k of ram, 1.02 MHz CPU, etc. though I suppose the 16-bit Apple //gs could have been a contender). Macs would have been way too expen…

> but basically in the 80s you mostly only had a choice of 8-bit computers

Ah, that was my confusion. I thought we would compare with systems nowadays, to replace the Amiga.

> A DOS PC could have run a multi-threaded program, but if an issue happened then I guess the whole system would go down

Eh, not really. DOS was for almost all intents and purposes as single threaded as the other systems. Segmentation allowed for some sense of relocation, and this was used for TSRs as "background programs", but that's not much of a departure from any of the other systems you mentioned.

> As for security patches, I was expressing a bit of frustration there because I have seen over and over a Windows "security patch" introduce bugs or break functionality. You didn't have that problem back then with the Amiga. It just worked.

Yeah, but that was only because there simply was no untrusted networking. All the other systems fared the same in that regard. And had the Amiga survived, it would need exactly as much security patching as the other systems.

Re: Amiga runs Michigan schools' heating and air conditioning systems (2015)

#74

Post by shever73 »

Slight nitpick: the Amiga was released in 1985, so the system dates at least from 1986. Other sources say 1987, which is not the "early 1980s" as the article says.

However, it's still cool that it's running. I love seeing old tech that's still just running. In the early 2000s, one of my clients was running a woodcutting system off a ZX Spectrum. They wanted to replace it, but the cost to rewrite their custom software would have been so much that they ended up buying a few used Spectrums as backup.

Re: Amiga runs Michigan schools' heating and air conditioning systems (2015)

#75

Post by pjmlp »

hoten wrote: post #29
tivert wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I suspect this is what would be difficult to replace. A bespoke wireless sensor monitoring and communications system, integrated into an old heating/cooling system. Modern system just would not integrate into this, without a lot of work. You would have to replace everything, probably including the actual heating/cooling systems themselves. I wonder if it just integrated into a pre-existing control network: > The Co…

The number of layers added to modern programming and computer systems has gone up significantly since the 80s. It's sensible to claim that a kid from the 80s had far less to learn to be effective in the world of the 80s, than a 20s kid would need today.

As 80's coding kid, I am quite confident that kids would be able to master coding Arduinos, ESP32, BBC Micro and Raspberry PIs.

As to be effective in today's world, already knowing that is more than many teenagers know beyond doing likes in social media.

Re: Amiga runs Michigan schools' heating and air conditioning systems (2015)

#76

Post by Lio »

Sunspark wrote: post #63
anyfoo wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That 80s Amiga is probably incredibly reliable and robust with its real multi-tasking OS and doesn't require "security patches". I generally agree with some of your comment, but this sentence confuses me a bit. I'd argue that the only reason that it does not require security patches is because it's not attached to any network. Though, probably the only actual reason would be that nobody is looking too closely at th…

I am sure someone else can explain it better, but basically in the 80s you mostly only had a choice of 8-bit computers (like Apple, C64, etc.), DOS, Macs, Atari ST and Amiga. The 8-bit machines weren't really networking compatible or powerful enough to do more than 1 thing at a time (128k of ram, 1.02 MHz CPU, etc. though I suppose the 16-bit Apple //gs could have been a contender). Macs would have been way too expen…

> A DOS PC could have run a multi-threaded program, but if an issue happened then I guess the whole system would go down. So that leaves the Amiga.

> It was also the only machine with a true multi-tasking OS. Everything else was either co-operative or non.

> If an issue happened with one piece, it wouldn't have brought down the whole system because everything was able to run independently.

The Amiga was an amazing systems and the best choice they had available to them at the time but...

it's easy to forget it lacked memory protection. That's one of the design decisions that made it run so well on the limited hardware of the time.

It also meant that if one of your multitasking programs went down there was a very high likelihood it would bring the rest of the system down too.

Re: Amiga runs Michigan schools' heating and air conditioning systems (2015)

#78

Post by asu_thomas »

sillywalk wrote: post #52

NASA also used Amigas - [0] Gary Jones replied; "And Commodore was easy to work with back then. When we asked for documentation, they sent us a stack of documentation about four feet high. They were willing to tell us everything about their machine. Since we had to design some custom hardware to go inside, it really helped to know exactly how everything worked." "It just turned out that it was a good machine. The thi…

[flagged]

Re: Amiga runs Michigan schools' heating and air conditioning systems (2015)

#79

Post by b800h »

shever73 wrote: post #74

Slight nitpick: the Amiga was released in 1985, so the system dates at least from 1986. Other sources say 1987, which is not the "early 1980s" as the article says. However, it's still cool that it's running. I love seeing old tech that's still just running. In the early 2000s, one of my clients was running a woodcutting system off a ZX Spectrum. They wanted to replace it, but the cost to rewrite their custom software…

I wonder what became of that. Of course, fast forward to now and they could migrate to ZX Nexts. :-)

Re: Amiga runs Michigan schools' heating and air conditioning systems (2015)

#80

Post by shever73 »

b800h wrote: post #79
shever73 wrote: post #74

Slight nitpick: the Amiga was released in 1985, so the system dates at least from 1986. Other sources say 1987, which is not the "early 1980s" as the article says. However, it's still cool that it's running. I love seeing old tech that's still just running. In the early 2000s, one of my clients was running a woodcutting system off a ZX Spectrum. They wanted to replace it, but the cost to rewrite their custom software…

I wonder what became of that. Of course, fast forward to now and they could migrate to ZX Nexts. :-)

Yes, me too. I'm no longer in that geographic area (or area of the industry, for that matter), so I don't know.

However, I am anxiously awaiting my Spectrum Next...it seems to be inching towards a delivery date.

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