5 ms·

My work is pretty bad. We have a box running windows 3.1 hooked up to an instrument on our plant. The answer I got when I asked about it was it has a proprieta

My work is pretty bad. We have a box running windows 3.1 hooked up to an instrument on our plant. The answer I got when I asked about it was it has a proprietary ISA DAQ card in it with 'flaky' drivers' that prevents us upgrading it. It's a non critical instrument but is providing 'useful' data I think its some type of microwave radar measurement instrument - very specialised hardware. It's been working well since the 90's so not worth spending money until it fails. "Proprietary hardware cards" are notorious in industrial control system world they inevitably lock you into some ancient infrastruture when modern hardware and O/S's stop supporting ISA slots and things like that.

cnvogel 11y ago
As late as 2008 or so, when leaving university, there was still a PC running DOS for it's pulse height analyzer card for spectroscopy. Same thing: still works, and the pain to use it is not bad enough to warrant the $10k or whatever it takes to replace it with a completely new measurement system.... Which often won't even have better specs regarding the actual measurement.
cptnbob 11y ago
One of our clients still has a DOS box connected to a 14.4k modem that we have to drag EDI interchanges off. You wouldn't believe how much it cost to get a modem and POTS line installed in our DC so we could talk to it. There's a windows service written in .net that talks to it via a serial port and POSTs it to a REST endpoint.
- cnvogel 11y ago
  Of course you could put a small internet connected embedded box to your clients place... (maybe even a commercial terminal server, if you trust the security of it) and directly emulate the whole modem+POTS line.
  - cptnbob 11y ago
    They paid for our modem setup so meh ;-)
photosinensis 11y ago
I worked with RS232 earlier this year, and I hope to return to it in some capacity. Sometimes, the old stuff isn't even all that bad.

cnvogel 11y ago

As late as 2008 or so, when leaving university, there was still a PC running DOS for it's pulse height analyzer card for spectroscopy. Same thing: still works, and the pain to use it is not bad enough to warrant the $10k or whatever it takes to replace it with a completely new measurement system.... Which often won't even have better specs regarding the actual measurement.

cptnbob 11y ago

One of our clients still has a DOS box connected to a 14.4k modem that we have to drag EDI interchanges off. You wouldn't believe how much it cost to get a modem and POTS line installed in our DC so we could talk to it. There's a windows service written in .net that talks to it via a serial port and POSTs it to a REST endpoint.

cnvogel 11y ago
Of course you could put a small internet connected embedded box to your clients place... (maybe even a commercial terminal server, if you trust the security of it) and directly emulate the whole modem+POTS line.
- cptnbob 11y ago
  They paid for our modem setup so meh ;-)

photosinensis 11y ago

I worked with RS232 earlier this year, and I hope to return to it in some capacity. Sometimes, the old stuff isn't even all that bad.