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by bigger_cheese
3291 days ago
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I've seen a lot of specialized measurement equipment running on ancient hardware - oldest I've personally seen is a microwave radar analyser running windows 3.1 as far as I know this is due to a specialized hardware card. Some industries are still full of Unix boxes from the 90's RS/6000 vintage. I've heard oil and gas industry is pretty bad for this sort of stuff especially in industrial control systems. |
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Problems arise when some bright spark figures out that it would be much easier to collect data via a network, directly from $Expensive_Device - or when another bright spark in accounting figures one can do without spare parts; after all, OEMs are supposed to keep stock of spares, right? No. Not years - decades - after sending out the EoL notice.
As an aside, I probably have one of the largest concentrations of Motorola pSOS hardware in the world in my shed (that is, the office next door) - my employer used a LOT of pSOS kit in the nineties, and as the platform became obsolete, noone thought to preserve a supply of spare parts; I quite literally dumpster-dived to reclaim whatever I could which warehouse staff had been told to get rid of.
Still happens every now and then that a customer asks for pSOS thingies. I really should get myself a stuffed dodo to put on the shelf next to the Motorola boxes...