[walnutclosefarm]

Old machines and OSs are also common in medicine. At the hospital/clinic where I worked, we had a total of around 300,000 devices on our network, and at one point five or so years ago, counted over 5% of them running out of support OSs, often on hardware that was a couple of decades old. We had to maintain multiple WEP wireless nets in order to connect many of them, because they did not support WPA in any form, let alone the WPA-AES we specified as the minimum standard. The oldest OS was a pre 1.0 version of Linux that ran a 25+ year old fluoroscope (a kind of X-ray device) that worked fine in its clinical setting, and would cost millions of dollars to replace, which cost the clinical department had no wish or intent to incur. The largest by count, though, were medical devices that embedded long dead Windows OSs.

The security implications of this mess were enormous. It's impossible to track the vulnerabilities on this old stuff, and challenging even to determine across the enterprise what is exposed to what.

[liveoneggs]

I helped with a PC rollout to a hospital, replacing orange-on-black thin clients. Thin clients (or modern equivalent) are definitely the best way to run these large campus systems.

I sometimes wonder why there isn't a market for an enterprise-specific/secured/stable web browser for just such applications, which isn't subjected to the churn of consumer chrome and firefox.

Hospital apps could safely target and rely on dated support + feature agreements and stuff.

[walnutclosefarm]

Thin clients are fine for the general purpose computing devices, at least where they work. But in a medical and research setting, you have multitudes of devices that have an embedded OS and their own user interface - everything from infusion pumps to giant MR or CT scanners (which may be half a dozen computers networked together, with multiple NICs on the intranet, and multiple dedicated UI devices). There is no replacing these, you just have to figure out how to make them work nicely together. Beyond that you have multiple real PCs running fat control software for machines (mass specs, blood analyzers, flow cytometers, ...) that uses the network to run the device, and cannot be replaced with a thin client. And finally, of course, you will have a few fat client-server apps that don't run in a browser, and connect directly to services from the PC.