This makes me think about the hospital I used to work at that had an old 386 parked in the shop running the HVAC system. They had it completely off the network and had to keep it because it was the only way to run the proprietary HVAC control software and would cost an absurd amount of money to upgrade to be compatible with modern systems and it still did its job.
I imagine a future where there is a computer like that running windows 11 in some basement and new employees are trained “don’t even think about touching this thing, its doing its job.”
We still have handful of those around at work. 2000, XP and maybe some embedded variant of 98 too still somewhere. They are controlling some non-critical but still useful industrial stuff with stupidly large price tag to replace.
Specially XP is still going to be around for quite a while in industrial settings where the production line is controlled via single computer and replacing it would mean replacing the whole line with price tag potentially in millions. And those aren’t even that old machines, their planning and manufacturing just takes “a while” due to certifications and everything.
This makes me think about the hospital I used to work at that had an old 386 parked in the shop running the HVAC system. They had it completely off the network and had to keep it because it was the only way to run the proprietary HVAC control software and would cost an absurd amount of money to upgrade to be compatible with modern systems and it still did its job.
I imagine a future where there is a computer like that running windows 11 in some basement and new employees are trained “don’t even think about touching this thing, its doing its job.”
Don’t have to worry about that, win11 isn’t reliable enough for that.
We had a similar situation for a voicemail system though.
Good point, it’ll just be XP, which is already happening in lots of places.
We still have handful of those around at work. 2000, XP and maybe some embedded variant of 98 too still somewhere. They are controlling some non-critical but still useful industrial stuff with stupidly large price tag to replace.
Specially XP is still going to be around for quite a while in industrial settings where the production line is controlled via single computer and replacing it would mean replacing the whole line with price tag potentially in millions. And those aren’t even that old machines, their planning and manufacturing just takes “a while” due to certifications and everything.