Windows 3.1 brings Paris airport to a halt

If it works it works, the danger with new software is while it should work it won't necessarily do so. People have trust in old systems that work over new ones that should in theory work. You don't want to pay a shedload for people to make a new system only to find out it sucks. Look at how the government wastes money attempting to update the NHS or implement some other system, millions and millions ends up wasted.

There was a youtube thing linked to a while back on reddit that shows some of the switch stations on the New York subway still runs on valves and hasn't even been switched to something as modern as a Windows 3.1 system. The cost of rewiring, and fixing the entire section would be in the millions, cause a huge amount of downtime to the system so they pay silly money to guys who can actually cope with hardware that hasn't been made in mass production for something like 50 years. When something breaks they send out to get custom stuff made from metal workers/glass blowers and the like.

It's amazing what some modern systems still run on.
 
Used to work for a major telco who had antiques running management software providing services to some heaving hitting public and private sector customers. Name a big brand, their stuff was managed by it.

Would they pay to upgrade it? No chance. Would they create a severely escalated incident and demand all hands to the pump to fix it when it broke? Of course. Just stick it on the risk register, cancel the expensive end of life support agreements and sweat the assets. Every single time. Only play the managers knew to cut costs and make a name for themselves.
 
My previous company was up until very recently running their entire global database for home office and construction sites on AS400.
 
Pawnless Endgame said:
Yeah, NHS here. We were on XP until end of March this year (so end of 2014/15 financial year). Then moved up to 7. The problem is......... 4GB of RAM..... on 32-bit /facepalm.
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4gb of ram is supported by 32bit windows 7, it just means some apps aren't able to access all the memory. There can be other reasons that aren't so obvious, if like our trust, you have a parallel server upgrade, it gives you time to upgrade things like your print servers to supply 64bit drivers. Also if you use a lot of scripts and packages to deploy software, then those may need updated to work with 64bit systems.
 
neil_g said:
Yeah right, I swear every as400 engineer we've had out has been about 80 :D
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I've actually studied COBOL85 at college but never put it to any real use.

drunkenmaster said:
If it works it works, the danger with new software is while it should work it won't necessarily do so. People have trust in old systems that work over new ones that should in theory work. You don't want to pay a shedload for people to make a new system only to find out it sucks. Look at how the government wastes money attempting to update the NHS or implement some other system, millions and millions ends up wasted.

There was a youtube thing linked to a while back on reddit that shows some of the switch stations on the New York subway still runs on valves and hasn't even been switched to something as modern as a Windows 3.1 system. The cost of rewiring, and fixing the entire section would be in the millions, cause a huge amount of downtime to the system so they pay silly money to guys who can actually cope with hardware that hasn't been made in mass production for something like 50 years. When something breaks they send out to get custom stuff made from metal workers/glass blowers and the like.

It's amazing what some modern systems still run on.
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I did myself out of a fairly cushy job that involved hand re-entering data from an ancient Unix platform to their Windows one by showing them how to automate the process - should have kept my mouth shut... 100s of thousands and several months later (as part of a bigger digital update) the resulting solution was buggier and had less features than the proof of concept I'd whipped up in an afternoon.

On the second part my old IT teacher used to produce pin compatible breakout boards that replaced ICs that are no longer produced that kept production systems going on antiquated hardware - a lot of 70s-80s systems have socketed ICs rather than soldered SMD components.
 
Until a few weeks ago, my workplace still had a couple of fruit machines using Z80 processors. Dual processor boards a foot square with bona fide Zilog Z80s. None of the parts in the machines have been made this century, but some people knew what could be repaired and how to do it. The machines still work - they were removed because they had major security flaws and everyone+dog could find out how to rob them.

Stuff that works is stuff that works. "Better" systems are only better if they work better and it's surprising how much doesn't work as well as the "obsolete" systems it replaces.
 
Angilion said:
Stuff that works is stuff that works. "Better" systems are only better if they work better and it's surprising how much doesn't work as well as the "obsolete" systems it replaces.
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Problem is we are moving from the days when people had a really passion for coding to career programmers (99% of whom are completely lost the moment they have to go off the path they've been taught) who do a pretty sloppy job in the main combined with a system that generally considers code complete when its "mostly" working as intended. (I understand the reasons for the type of project management used these days to ensure progress but its really frustrating sometimes).
 
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Rroff said:
I should brush up my COBOL heh seems less and less people with experience of it any more and quite a lot of backend systems programmed using it still in production use. I think we still have a dozen IBM system line servers in the main racks at work.
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There are quite a few major systems running COBOL/DBS/CICS in production and running on mainframes.
 
50 posts in and nobody has posted this yet... OcUK I am disapoint!

udp0w.jpg
 
I have some programs at work compiled in Quickbasic that run in a DOS environment. They will run on machines up to Win98SE but no newer.
 
as 400 is solid. Worked on that for my first job out of uni and wouldn't be surprised if the company still use it.

Just because something is new doesn't necessarily mean its better for particular purposes.
 
iamtheoneneo said:
as 400 is solid. Worked on that for my first job out of uni and wouldn't be surprised if the company still use it.

Just because something is new doesn't necessarily mean its better for particular purposes.
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I agree with you from a functionality standpoint and the view of "it ain't broke so why fix it". However kit gets older, hardware becomes obsolete and sourcing parts for them becomes incredibly difficult. No business continuity plan should ever need to contain "buy 2nd hand parts from eBay".

Not to mention 3rd parties and vendors love to charge huge sums of money for supporting legacy kit, which is a false economy as the year of year costs for maintenance far outstrip the new equipment costs in most instances.
 
George Hincapie said:
Windows XP on the new Queen Elizabeth class aircraft carriers.
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Sometimes knowing an old system inside out is better than using a new system.

The problem with operating systems is that maintaining development SDK and maintenance contracts become exponentially more expensive as the OS gets older.

I often wonder if Steve Job's super yacht is out of date yet? El Capitan probably means the captain orders a course change and five minutes later the ship starts attempting the adjustment. None of the existing boat control and entertainment applications probably work either..
 
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Skeeter said:
50 posts in and nobody has posted this yet... OcUK I am disapoint!

https://i.imgflip.com/udp0w.jpg[img][/QUOTE]

[quote="Mat, post: 28836323"]My sentiments exactly! In fact, I'm annoyed that the very last post I get to is the one thing I wanted to post :mad:[/QUOTE]

I posted the meme, but not the img. Maybe you didn't read the thread?

[url]http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showpost.php?p=28834786&postcount=21[/url]
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