Still booting after all these years: The people stuck using ancient Windows computers
Still booting after all these years: The people stuck using ancient Windows computers
Mail sorter for a company I worked for uses Windows 3.1.
My parents ancient HP from 1997, I sold the motherboard with popped capacitors for $250. I informed the buyer of the condition and he said he didn't care, he'd fix it, but they needed it for some legacy hardware their company functioned on.
😂 🤣
Similarly, my Dad ran his medical office on Win98 until he died (2011).
Of course, he had no support for OS or the medical office software other than himself (and me).
Had a supplier of inexpensive old machines/parts.
All cause he refused to pay the $5k required to upgrade the medical office software that ran on those machines. 🤷♂️
My dad's company still runs software from 2002 for recording sales and sending bills. Runs fine on Windows 10 surprisingly
I was tearing out ancient infrastructure for a new office and my eye kept going to a rectangular square box on the wall. Finally realized it was a PC! The cause of death was clear, PSU fan died, killed itself from heat. It was a form factor I had never seen, but standard nonetheless. It was running an answering machine system in DOS, still worked! Such a rare machine I've only found a single reference on the web and a single video about it. 1999, 486XS (I know, would kill for a DX, it's soldered on), upgraded from 2x 2MB SIMMs to a whopping 2x 64MB SIMMs. Imagine what that would have cost in the day!
LONG story, but I got it running Windows 95b. 3.1 was just too much challenge to get it networked and happy. Much pain was removed when I got a USB floppy emulator. Can't do jack without a floppy! Broke the network card drivers, need to start over. Had it running Doom with a legit SoundBlaster card and could RDP into over the network.
It was an amazing journey getting it all together and updated. Most of that knowledge is gone from the internet, and I sure don't remember all the tricks. Going to be my first token ring machine! LOL, had to get parts from Romania and trash cans.
I binge people doing this type of thing on YouTube lol. I miss working in the industry
If you ever see yourself in the need of information about the DOS era again, Vogons is the place to go IMHO.
But it's all in poetry, unfortunately.
Man, remember when people used to break into offices to steal the RAM?
My work experience in around 1995 was spent at a local computer firm.
At one point a group of men in balaclavas showed up, the boss stopped playing Doom long enough to cover the security camera and hand over a bunch of crumpled banknotes, and I was handed this pile of SIMMs to put in a test rig to make sure they were OK to sell.
I also had to straighten the pins on used/stolen 486 CPUs, and pretty sure at one point was taken to break into a warehouse. There was certainly nobody else in the whole building, and we loaded the van with a bunch of cheap looking boxes before taking them back to HQ.
The boss was also banging a girl in my class, which in later years I learned makes him a paedo. Times sure were simpler in 1995.
The cause of death was clear, PSU fan died, killed itself from heat.
PSU: "Release...me...from this mockery called life"
At my old workplace, there was numerous XP machines still going. They were running old machine equipment, and basically served as a controller for the entire machine.
As it turns out, it was cheaper to keep these XP stations, instead of buying a completely new Hydrolic press, or whatever it was running, which cost several hundred of thousands of dollars.
One day one of these computers stopped working, and we immediately tried to get the software to work on a brand new W10 replacement. Took us a week of drivers hell, until we eventually went to the basement, found an exact replica, and swapped the HDD over.
The company, making these heavy machineries, went bankrupt in the early 2000s, and there was literally no way of getting the software to run on anything besides that original box.
I'd like a law that software / hardware companies who file for bankruptcies must release the source / files for their tech to an open source repository.
That idea often comes up in these discussions and I've never really had an argument against. Best I got is that parts of that software may have moved to more modern stuff that was purchased by another company. But that's a damned thin excuse not to implement this.
If you are a big company there are often ESCROW agreements for things like this. I have encountered the “data dumps” from time to time and whilst it’s “better” it’s not ideal. Half finished documentarian, virtual machines of mis-configured OS installs… it’s almost as if it was just a straight copy of the development environment as it was just as they made the final version of the software…
But it’s better than nothing.
Main issue I can see with this forcing open source would be libraries and frameworks licensed from others who would likely still be in business and wouldn’t agree to those parts becoming open sourced. See also WinAMP https://www.theregister.com/2024/10/16/opensourcing_of_winamp_goes_badly/
I like that idea bit it'll never fly. That software is an asset. A bankrupt company needs every asset to be sold to cover as much percentage of their debt to their vendors as possible. I've been in a company that went bankrupt and I've been the vendor of a company that went bankrupt. Being the vendor was the harder experience.
There's still things like that on my workplace today. I think there's some older, rarely used CNC with Win98 on the controller. We just keep spares around when they break, but that's cheaper than replacing the whole machinery. Also there's some XP stations running software for an industrial machine which would cost quarter of a million to replace. Some of those need access to network drives and such but they live in a strictly isolated VLAN.
And, as far as I've told at least, there was no option at any point to upgrade just the computers on those things. It's always the whole assembly line or whatever they're connected to. There's not many companies willing to throw hundreds of thousands every 3-5 years to replace perfectly working equipment.
It's funny, because this scenario actually happened in our CNC hall.
The guys over there were working with SolidWorks and Mastercam. I never really got too involved with their work, other than installing the software remotely for them.
It could very well have been a CNC machine that this procedure was about. I just know that they had all kinds of equipment in there, along with a hydrolic press, which peaked my interest the most because of a certain Finnish youtuber haha.
I set up a 32 bit Windows 7 VM so my dad could keep using his old drawing program that was built for Windows 3.11.
It was the last version of Windows to support 3.11 compabillity.
Works well.
Just a note: Windows software for controlling hardware is highly likely to assume a)direct access to the hardware (sometimes mediated thorough ancient APIs and assuming the existence of defunct expansion slots) and b) assume meatspace time can be counted using OS timing ticks (which get stretched out as modern VMs timeshare with other processes underneath the virtulized hardware). It is awfully tough to replace them sometimes.
Yeah, and as long as these things never touch the internet, there really isn't an issue.
There are third parties that create new software for old industrial machines for this exact reason.
At one of my old works we had a SMT machine allegedly built in 2012 which was running on XP. Worked flawlessly 🤷
Stuck or preferred choice?
Trapped using software they needed to buy once, vs rent?
Yes, stuck. There are enourmous problems with different institutions having to use ancient PCs because the software doesn't work on modern ones, be they electron microscopes, hospitals or industrial machinery, causing e.g. enourmous security issues. This is one of the most important reasons why FOSS and why making FOSS software mandatory in government contracts is so important.
Also how come people can't read the fucking article before commenting?
I'm a bit depressed that I finally need to upgrade my last windows 7 machine. It looks like it's 10 for me now :-(
https://www.fedoraproject.org/ https://linuxmint.com/ https://archlinux.org/ https://www.debian.org/ https://elementary.io/ https://system76.com/pop/
There are many safe open source options. If you need help there are ample resources available. If you want to you can also DM me.
I'm disturbed that an elevator is running a desktop OS. How did this happen? Did they never hear of microcontrollers?
My assumption would be that the display is not related to operating the elevator, but rather displaying information about businesses on the respective floors. I've seen those a fair few times, and since they run on isolated networks or even fully local, there's little risk.
Frighteningly, i worked as an admin at a hospitality wifi business that ran a windows box for dhcp duty. I would have to go o site, in the middle of the night, down to the basement of this hotel, and reboot the damn thing. It would die almost every week. Replaced with a linux server and never heard from them again.
I could tell you the stories of W95 & XP that runs the medical world...
The elevator was running Windows XP.
Clearly an extreme case of overengineering. A elevator has no business running more than a few microcontrollers.
It's probably only the screen component that is running an old version of embedded windows.
In highrises with lots of stops and users, it uses some more advanced software to schedule the optimal stops, or distribute the load between multiple lifts. A similar concept exists for HDD controllers, where the read write arm must move to different positions to load data stored on different plates and sectors, and Repositioning the head is a slow and expensive process that cuts down the data transfer rate.
Qube cinema servers only got off XP in 2015. They're still on 7 though.
But how else can it book requests for priority access, and verify the credit card for whoever booked the elevator?
Ah, the blossoms of unimpeded, wild capitalism.
But how else can it be safe to connect to the internet?
You need to be on-site to fix it anyway, just access the debug port.
I know it's not exactly the point of the article but for a lot of things, I reckon a good amount of 'innovation' was pretty pointless. I personally don't think I ever needed anything that Office 2003 can't do... (Of course I don't use any MS office to begin with but you get the point)
=Let(), Lambda and Regex were good additions to Excel imo
Whoa I had no idea of those functions. I just checked the documentation and I already know a hundred places I could use those.
Everything beyond the Dewey decimal system is/was pretty unnecessary, imo. We created a way to organize and "quickly" locate information stored in a physical format.
The near complete lack of manual labor has had many long reaching effects on society.
I type this on my brand new flagship phone...
I've been trying tk get family to switch to Linux, but some are irrationally attached to MS Word. I wonder if Office 2003 will run in Wine?
I've had success with Office 2010 under Wine.
https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iId=18487
I've heard LibreOffice has settings that make it look like Word
“Stuck”
Imagine being stuck using something that works for 30 years.
Right? If it still works then it still works.
If the article was talking about anything other than tech/software, we’d be praising its longevity.
And now you got a virus and it doesn't work anymore.
You can protect yourself from that with airgapping and backups. The bigger issue is probably that it's becoming increasingly hard to source parts for such old hardware.
Ancient industrial machines use ancient windows computers. This has been known forever. There's a whole niche industry of very expensive ram and hard drives and other components keeping this industry going
Yeah man. Details are going to be fuzzy here, but I think it was only in recent memory where Boeing upgraded the planes in Japan to no longer need floppy disks.
Yes i still use floppy disks regularly for my cnc plasma table
Good for them. If it works, it works. I wouldn't connect it to the internet though.
I run a computer on Win7 at work, because it needs some important legacy software. It can't be containered because it has a nasty licence manager.
And my oscilloscope runs on Win98.
MS DOS 6.6 for me - I enjoy the power of a 286 processor and much smaller instruction sets.
:O
Luxury. All I had was a 186.
with a 5.25 as A and B.!
Vic 20 here, I just like a green font
I’m visiting my parents in my home country after many years of not being there. I’m hoping my dad’s old pentium 2 laptop is still around.
I would bet there are still a few old pieces of industrial machinery around that I duct taped together by imaging an ancient PC and transferring it to a Virtual Box VM.
There are many, many machines out there running 95 and even earlier versions. The issue is that a machine from 30 years ago is almost always still using the software that came with the machine… 30 years ago.
Even if the OS has received security patches, which isn’t even assured, the company may either no longer be in business, or charge for new OS drivers/specialized software.
In many cases, your options are literally to replace an entire machine worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, or deal with the networking nightmare that is “keep this on the network, but not on the network.”
I use a Windows XP machine for work nearly every day. And yeah, it’s because it runs some of the most expensive equipment in the company.
BART wrote a PDP8 cross assembler in the late 90s, that they still use today.
https://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/plucky/man1/palbart.1.html
I 4 years ago I remotely reinstalled Wonderware and necessary drivers on a Windows NT3.51 HMI controlling a mango line in Africa (I don't remember exactly, maybe Burkina?). Not fun, there wasn't much documentation left.
One year later I had to do it again.
there's a word for those people: awesome
windows xp was peak; running anything before xp is legendary
I ran Linux 1994ish. Amiga OS before. Amstrad CPC 464 before. A friend ran Sinclair ZX-80, that was the first system I had access to.
aside from radio shack and texas instruments that i used at camp, i think i was sadly too young to do anything but windows 3.1 :( our first computer was a tandy sensation in the early 90s and i didn't really play with linux until maybe the mid 2000s
except for playing with apple IIe and radio shack computers through school and camp, that is.
Idk, it was horrendously insecure, would freeze a lot, and missing creature comforts like window tiling.
Tbh I think you're letting nostalgia blind you to XP's flaws a little.
If they kept refining Win7 it would've been great.
Idk, it was horrendously insecure, would freeze a lot, and missing creature comforts like window tiling.
It was significantly more secure than it's DOS-based predecessor of the time, Windows ME (that's a whole other rabbit hole; if you wanna talk insecure and buggy as fuck - look no further). That's what people don't realize, they look at the past through a modern lens. You gotta look at it from the time it was released. There's a reason mainstream consumer-focused Windows editions dropped DOS and moved to the NT kernel. XP was the first real consumer version of Windows based on XP NT.
If they kept refining Win7 it would've been great.
They did, it was called "Windows 8" and nobody liked it.
We've got multiple tools still on Windows 2000, happily running production. They're on an airgapped network though, so no issues.
People keep saying to keep these XP machines off the internet. I seriously doubt there's much threat, especially for even older OS's like 98 and 95. It's the very devil just trying to browse with them, nothing much out there is going to be able to attack them. Security through obscurity indeed!
In any case, we're no longer in the Wild West days when people had machines hooked directly to the internet and a firewall was a third-party addon. LOL, ZoneAlarm anyone!
We all have a basic firewall built into our routers so unless you deliberately expose services you're fairly bulletproof to scanners. I remember scanning for Win2000 machines in blocks of IPs, long after it was defunct. Plenty were out there!
You are forgetting targeted attacks. A blind attack would pretty much not have much of an effect indeed, however if the attacker knows the machine, then it's easy for the attackers to exploit these vulnerability if left "out in the open", and cause havoc, possibly create a lot of damages or leech informations pumped into those machines via old Windows installations.
If not for DX10 and above not even existing on it, afaik, I'd still be using XP. That was the best iteration until they forcibly made you have to upgrade if you played games (especially if you wanted to play Halo on PC).
especially if you wanted to play Halo on PC
I still giggle that after years and years of Halo 3+ being a console exclusive, and Halo 2 sucking on Windows for years*, the entire Halo collection now has a Gold rating on Linux. I have very specific memories of being annoyed for years that the most prestigious Microsoft game doesn't work on a Microsoft gaming platform (Windows).
*God damn does Games for Windows Live suck
I would totally hang with that lady in the thumbnail lol
My wife still using windows 2000 on her laptop. Still boots and runs. She just doesn't connect it to the internet.
Depends if the photo was taken recently or at the time W95 was around...
Hey she could still be chill and using Win 95 to this day!
"stuck" more like happy to not have to deal with the last 15-ish years of microsoft ruining everything they previously excelled at.
They lost me when they removed the start button on the left side of the taskbar in version 8.1 (I think it was) to... Be cool with the kids (I think 8.1 was supposed to be touch screen friendly)? I don't even know, but I went back to Windows 7 for a long while.
The backlash with the start button was so huge that they put it back on the taskbar in Windows 10 (at least mine has it and is the reason I got Windows 10). I'm currently refusing to update to Windows 11, because it apparently crashes when playing certain video games and I'm not about to have the other trash bugs that come with it, which I've been seeing posted on Microsoft help forums when I search for Windows 10 related questions. Fuck that noise, I don't want to deal with it.
I have had better luck with game compatibility using proton on linux than I had with win 11
They seemingly wanted to design the entire interface around touchscreen 2-in-1s. If you went in a Microsoft store around the time windows 8 came out, they were leaning really hard into the 2-in-1s. I got a surface pro 3 at that time that I used to take handwritten notes in school, and the windows 8 interface was honestly awesome with that use case. On my desktop PC, though, I held out updating from 7 until windows 10.
Never thought I'd miss Ballmer, but here we are.
Yeah. Its a gross feeling isn't it?
Some might be surprised how many systems are still running on AS400s. IBM still makes and maintains IBMi, the modern iteration. My last company wrote our flagship product for these machines, all green screen. Our customers would sometimes move to our GUI product and jump right back to the prompt menus. Hey, if you gotta move fast and have a bulletproof system, text menus are the only way to fly!
By my god, the skill set for running and programming those beasts touches on almost nothing I've learned in 30+ years of IT work. Wish I had got experience in that part of the company, seen some solid job posts for that sorta tech.
I worked in the airline industry for years and learned a GUI overlay for one system and another entirely green screen system called SHARES (see if you can guess the airline). Honestly I kind of enjoyed working with those systems; there's some refreshing "back to basics" feeling kind of like driving a manual transmission.
In my current job I've been using another legacy system. Well, my job was to create a relatively modern service for the legacy system to call, but none of the remaining developers knew how to use the extensions of that system that does SOAP calls. So I had to learn just enough of that legacy system to hold their hands through the parts that call my service. Kind of fun, to be honest!
I would still be using Windows 7 if it was safe to connect to the internet.
I can't believe government systems are just open to cyber security like that.
Are there not cyber terrorists for some teenager that has tried to do anything with these unsecured systems?
Just slap some bit defender on it. That’s all that we have to do with windows 10 and we’re all good to go. Hey if Linux can run on the same box for all these years and be safe theres no reason why any windows system can’t be safe with a simple add on.
Windows 11 is just a tmp chip added to board
Srsly that is all. Something smaller than a thumb drive changed and they are trying to convince the world to make more waste. It’s fucking stupid. Microsoft can eat fat ass.
Why would Windows 7 not be "safe" to connect to the internet? Do you understand how any of this works?
Lemmy is overloaded with people that puff up and want to present like they know things about tech, when they know basically nothing.
Get a hardware firewall, get basic safe practices in place, don't do basic user operations as admin, and configure shit correctly. If you think that your OS is there to protect you, you are a tech foooooooooooooool
Why not? Still using Windows 7 on one of my ThinkPads. It's a solid system, if you know what you're doing and how to use is safely.
and how to use is safely.
Such as by disconnecting the ethernet and power cables
If it serves their needs then more power to them. Tech companies today more than ever make sure you keep buying.
The dot net framework was ported to Windows 95/98 so they can use more software now.
I had a 486DX running DOS for writing and editing CAM programs for CNC mills, lathes, pipe bender, and a laser cutter. And for funsies, an even older Macintosh that booted from a 5 1/4" floppy that ran a CMM, (co-ordinate measuring machine). And the software for the CMM ran from another 5 1/4" floppy.
This was about 2017 before I retired as a toolmaker.
Stuck?
Nuclear silos.. is that early dos system I believe?
As long as things are not connected and not trying to add newer stuff , what's the problem?
Instead of using old proprietary shit you could use Linux or *BSD with a vintage desktop environment and have a blast
Something I noticed is that basic users (someone using a fucking 30 y/o OS is definitely one) have an easier time with *nix because most "technical" people are overfitted and brainwashed to the Micro$uck ecosystem
Instead of using old proprietary shit you could use Linux or *BSD with a vintage desktop environment and have a blast
I'm not sure you get it.
The CnC operator, for instance, didn't choose windows; they chose the CnC machine because it's best at making wood into shapes they need. It came with 'a computer' to control it. That computer had a desktop and an icon.
You see how CHOOSING THE OS wasn't on the list? They chose - and fucking get this - A CNC MACHINE out of a printed catalogue with a 30-word write-up. The number of CnC machines with a Unix or Linux or BSD or BeOS install on them in 2000 was - drumroll please - zero.
If you want to fix that, you're going to need a time machine. Remember to bring your flag with you.
Go learn about ReactOS, too.
If a system is extremely old you can use Alpine Linux with no desktop environment
I like the little typo ... c:// :)
I think i still have a copy of this OS. Along with NT4.0 and various others. I hoard stuff like this.
I just found the Warcraft install disk for Windows 98 if y'all need something to do...
Stuck? What can you do that I can't on Windows 7?
Read an article, apparently - it explains why the old systems are still in use.