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A Commodore 64 Is Still Being Used to Run an Auto Shop in Poland
- dgreenlieber 10y agoI love this, here is a straightforward technology getting the job done! Too many sophisticated and advanced solution are being built for no reason.
- icantdrive55 10y agoSo many auto shops/machine shops would be lost without access to older computers. So much equipment needs to be plugged into parallel ports. "If it works, why muck with it?"
- lallysingh 10y agoOr new computers with $20 parallel port/serial PCIe cards...
- detaro 10y agoGood luck getting old applications requiring ancient OSes to work on those.
- Grazester 10y agoRun them in a VM? Guess that would be complicating things?
- toxican 10y agoI think the initial setup would complicate things, but if setup correctly couldn't it just be an icon that boots up the VM or set the VM to start up on boot in batch script?
- izacus 10y agoYes - I mean WHY would you buy another computer, interface card, setup a VM, move everything over, test, make sure everything is compatible.... if the current offline system with its software works just fine?
- DougWebb 10y agoBecause doing all of that while the current system is still working is much easier than trying to do it after the old system has failed.
- vidarh 10y agoYou can still buy most components for the C64, and failing that, there are a number of FPGA systems that reimplements it, as well as the C64 Reloaded reimplementation by Individual Computers [1] who have also licensed the Commodore name and is about to produce replacement cases. Odds are that you'll still be able to replace a C64 with pretty much cycle exact replications long after you'd need to scramble for replacement for your current PC hardware... [1] http://wiki.icomp.de/wiki/C64_reloaded http://wiki.icomp.de/wiki/C64_reloaded
- bitJericho 10y agoThat's crazy when you can buy a working commodore or whatever for peanuts.
- nibnib 10y agoAnything with critical timing that runs over a parallel port can be very tricky to get working in a VM. It means running a realtime OS on top of a non-realtime OS, with some abstraction layers added. A C64 is very deterministic in comparison.
- kevin_thibedeau 10y agoI've had luck getting DOSEmu to interact with parallel port hardware. Don't know how well it would work on x64 though.
- detaro 10y agoGetting the hardware access to work properly (especially for systems as old as this, where I wouldn't be surprised if they do port timings by counting cycles) in a VM would be difficult. Not unsolvable, but for the engineering effort you can buy a lot of old machines as spares. (Or an FPGA-based C64 clone or something)
- huskyr 10y agoApart from complicating it, we're talking about an auto shop, not a tech company. I doubt they have lots of computer engineers hanging around.
- dcminter 10y agoCommodore 64C rather than the plain old 64 I think. Still very impressive! How on earth is that disk drive still working!?
- dozzie 10y agoMechanics around here are quite resourceful and either know electronics or know somebody who knows it. I would bet the floppy drive got repaired several times.
- amiga-workbench 10y agoThe drive has probably been re-aligned several times by now, they were never that good. The rubber band on the drive motor probably needed replacing too.
- dogma1138 10y agoOlder disk drives are considerably easier to fix, what often fails are the mechanical parts usually springs, gears or drive bands. And even when you do have a solid state component failure those are usually fairly easy to diagnose and repair since they are all made out of pretty big discrete components. Not that long ago you could still easily fix a motherboard, these days it's a royal pain with everything being integrated and with 8 or even 10 layer boards the power planes are usually inaccessible to users, and signal integrity is so critical that you can't even rebuilt the vast majority of traces reliably. 10 years ago you could easily replace the power distribution system on a motherboard and even a large part of the chips, I've managed to replace the network chipset on a few motherboards when it blew out because some genius plugged a hot POE ethernet cord into it and the magic smoke came out. Other than that replacing caps was a pretty standard procedure for reviving old motherboards, even that these days is considerably harder.
- PhasmaFelis 10y agoThe drive for our old C64 developed a thing fairly early on where some spring or other near the back would get out of alignment and the head would stop reading. It basically just needed to be poked back into place with a fingertip, but you had to open up the casing to do it. After repeated repair requests from frantic seven-year-olds, Dad cut a hole in the back of the drive just big enough to poke the blunt end of a pencil through so we could fix it ourselves. I learned to detect the subtle change in the drive's whirr when it was out of alignment, to distinguish that from any of the other things that could go wrong (corrupt disks, usually).
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- yitchelle 10y agoDon't change a working system.
- nathell 10y agoPreviously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10951404 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10951404
- grej 10y agoDuplicate from 14 hours ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12601820 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12601820
- toomanybeersies 10y agoRelated: McLaren needs a 20-year-old Compaq laptop to maintain its F1 supercar http://www.theverge.com/2016/5/3/11576032/mclaren-f1-compaq-laptop-maintenance http://www.theverge.com/2016/5/3/11576032/mclaren-f1-compaq-...
- drzaiusapelord 10y agoMcLaren decided to standardize on a conditional access card for security, which made sense back then, but it used a pcmcia interface. None of these are dealbreakers but it runs DOS which doesn't have modern drivers for USB adapters or new laptops. I imagine they could fix this in a variety of ways, but probably don't care and the number of old HP laptops compatible with this system vastly dwarf the number of F1's made, so there will never be a worry about not having one. Nor is this laptop customer facing, so its low priority to make it "look good." I also imagine booting up a hypervisor environment and dealing with dongles and adapters might be annoying/too technical/too buggy for the mechanics to have to deal with when they just want to work on a car and have an old but fool-proof laptop with almost no wear and tear ready to go.
- lmm 10y agoCould one run DosBOX or similar and have the host system pass-through PCMCIA (connected via a USB adapter or some such)?
- toomanybeersies 10y agoMy experience with passing through peripherals to VMs is that often it doesn't work very well. Earlier this year, I was doing some embedded systems work. The board could send serial data to the computer as a USB CDC device. It wouldn't work at all in Windows, or a Linux VM in Windows, as Windows wouldn't even recognise the device. So I suspect that it may not be as easy or as cheap to use DosBox or a VM as it is to just use old laptops.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- jug 10y agoFunny thing with the quote from Commodore USA's Facebook page. These guys are irrelevant to Commodore 64's other than having bought rights to use the name... :P Weird also how their Facebook page is still active, but their website and forum is defunct with no effort made to clarify their situation with their founder deceased since 2012.
- Pharylon 10y agoProbably a lot of spaghetti code doing those calculations. Time for a rewrite! ;)
- mhd 10y agoI wouldn't even be sure about that. I could just be a simple formula with a couple of lines of Basic. But all the prompts are using the right terminology (and language), the output is just as you need it and no one ever wrote a version that runs on something else. If it ain't broken... Homecomputer programming was just so very accesible. I'm reminded of "Why Johnny can't code" http://www.salon.com/2006/09/14/basic_2/ http://www.salon.com/2006/09/14/basic_2/
- maze-le 10y agoA lot of banks still use COBOL systems from the 70ies in their backend stack[0]. It might be the same issue with this small C64 for business: "Never touch a running system" [0]: http://www.bankingtech.com/375941/cobol-bank-it/ http://www.bankingtech.com/375941/cobol-bank-it/
- wiredfool 10y agoThere's a liquor store in Washington that was still using C128s for their POS system as recently as a year or so back. They had a couple of spares stashed on the top shelf.
- walkingolof 10y agoGo there, get a photo (or a couple) and post it here ! It would be very interesting to see what software they use.
- tssva 10y agoThe Commodore 128 had two processors, a 8502 and a Z80, and could run in C128, C64 or CP/M modes. The Z80 was used in CP/M mode. It would be interesting to see which mode the software runs in. I know there is still a POS system for the Commodore 64 sold and supported.
- wiredfool 10y agoI don't think they're still there, at least run by the same people. That store got sort of flattened by the Wa State liquor reconfiguration, where Costco and the grocery stores can now sell hard alcohol. (FWIW, it was the one in the back of Langley Village, on Whidbey Island).
- jerf 10y agoSomebody in the area should offer to help them out. Someone who knew what they were doing could pretty easily suck the whole thing into an emulator, and that would keep them going probably for the next several decades, if they like, without having to worry that the hardware going out will cause them problems, or that the disks will crap out. (I'd consider it myself but I'm about 2400 miles away.)
- ThinkBeat 10y agoSince it is used for balancing, I assume it interface with some hardware. Getting the hardware to work and finding a compatible port could be difficult, unless its just serial or parallel ports
- jerf 10y agoI think you might be surprised by how active the Commodore community has been. I haven't checked every possible component before writing this message but I'd bet the Commodore hardware ports are all available and can be hooked up to emulators just fine. And you can stockpile those for not much money right now. And while they, too, will have correlated failures over the course of decades as they decay, at least it starts the clock back at 0 again.
- cnvogel 10y ago> I'd bet the Commodore hardware ports are all > available and can be hooked up to emulators just fine. You are aware that the C64 expansion port is actually the 6510-CPUs address and data-bus? To properly emulate this cycle accurate in an emulator you'd have to attach about 30 I/O pins to your PC which you can update at a rate of 1MHz, with basically no latency between reads and writes, to connect external circuitry.
- mrob 10y agoEven if it doesn't need realtime performance, which it might, it's interfacing with custom hardware, so it's going to be tricky to emulate. This is more the kind of thing you'd use an Arduino for. The Arduino's old-fashioned 5V IO is probably useful in this case.
- JustSomeNobody 10y agoWow. They should totally rewrite everything in React.
- joezydeco 10y agoWhat are you, a luddite? It's Rust for everything now.
- JustSomeNobody 10y agoAh, yeah. I forgot what week this was.
- heywire 10y agoWait, did I miss the rewrite in Go?
- joezydeco 10y agoWe were too busy with the Haskell port to let you know. Sorry.
- huskyr 10y agoJeez, why don't they just rewrite it in Brainfuck.
- HalcyonicStorm 10y agoNah, fam, it would be so much more efficient to write it in Elixir
- keeganjw 10y agoI'm going retro and writing this in Prolog. I'm so over these modern languages.
- mbrock 10y agoI wonder if there's a local computer shop that supports their computing needs, like repairing the C64. The waste and exaggeration in computers is astounding. We're driving SUVs when we could be biking.
- JustSomeNobody 10y agoIt would be nice to hear more details because there's some discussion around how to replace this technology. An alternative perspective is to ask how much longer will this technology need to run? At what point will the equipment used to balance the drive shafts no longer be necessary because the older vehicles are no longer road worthy? Sure, I'm assuming this setup is for older vehicles, and that's why I'd like to hear more info, but the point is to not simply think about replacing an existing technology when it's better to let it run it's course.
- striking 10y agoBalancing driveshafts is a very current procedure. The vast majority of cars still use driveshafts today. And it's difficult not to use a computer to balance them. In this case, they just use a C64. If it ain't broke, don't fix it, right? When it does eventually stop working (give it another decade or so), they can probably just buy another C64. And then after that one dies, probably, cars will no longer require driveshafts. But who's to say; the prevalence of oil has survived much longer than many expected.
- vasaulys 10y agoI seem to recall reading that the original IBM PC was still in use at United States National Weather Service outposts. Why fix it if it isn't broken?
- LeonM 10y agoBecause if it breaks, there are no spare parts, the people that maintained the system are long gone and the software that it ran probably does not run on a modern computer/OS. Related: http://www.zdnet.com/article/a-23-year-old-windows-3-1-system-failure-crashed-paris-airport/ http://www.zdnet.com/article/a-23-year-old-windows-3-1-syste...
- bigger_cheese 10y agoThere are some old servers at my work. The oldest box I've personally seen runs Windows 3.1 it is a specialized measurement instrument (Microwave radar) with a hardware card that runs in an ISA slot. There are also a fair number of RS/6000 Unix boxes which are getting pretty long in the teeth. For spare parts I've heard sometimes engineers buy things like Scsi hard disks off of ebay.
- CyberDildonics 10y agoIt seems like there might be some sort of a market for a very simple computer that had every piece of the puzzle well documented and straightforward. Maybe even have just about everything visualized so you can see what is going on with your IO ports, interrupts, etc. Unfortunately it seems computers just got more complex and less transparent, but with modern technology I would think you could take a step back and make things much more transparent.
- chillingeffect 10y agoironically, it seems whatever function this C64 does isn't well-documented so it can't be easily ported to another platform. :) I guess it's a question of "do you want to port the code or the platform" :)
- lasermike026 10y agoThis demonstrates how small most computing requirements are. Bigger faster systems to do what? Store an address book? Calculate taxes? Print invoices? Most of our computing needs could be performed by a small embedded computer no greater than a raspberry pi.
- Keyframe 10y agoEven Raspberry Pi is an overkill. Look at with what we did tasks in 90's and we had it all good. Now look at RPi3 specs for example.
- khedoros 10y agoI see people complain about the low power of the Pi3...then I think about how I went through college with a slower computer than that, and how the people over the previous 30 years had even slower machines to use (if they had their own personal machine at all). What you can do with a couple MHz and a few hundred KB of memory is great, given a little ingenuity. Of course, you aren't going to do real-time face recognition on something like that, but 99% of what we need to do is just fine with 0.1% of the performance.
- pjmlp 10y agoOr the Arduino versus what we had with our 8-bit computers.
- tombert 10y agoAt the very least, the Raspberry Pi has a much lower power footprint, so even it's overkill, it's still probably better than a C64, at least in this one particular case. That said, I think the C64 thing is pretty neat, so I can't really knock it.
- pjmlp 10y agoI came to realize that Raspberry Pi would be a "supercomputer" to run Xerox PARC, ETHZ and DEC research OSes. So if we are still playing catch up with those environments, is just because the industry at large lacks the political agenda to push forward such technologies, and nothing to do with technical capabilities.
- ftvbffg 10y agoYear ago there were still many POS (point-of-sale) computers at retail stores running with "Subiekt 4" in my town in Poland. I even saw one in supermarket. DOS program from 1995. http://www.netsetup.pl/s4/img/Image2.gif http://www.netsetup.pl/s4/img/Image2.gif Connected to old EPSON parallel-port dot matrix printer (those printers were still surprisingly expensive). I remember editing "Subiekt 4" to change VAT tax from 22% to 23%. 22% tax was hardcoded. Over years there were many more tricks to keep it running, for example "Hyperthreading disabler" program. Year ago they were still running it in Dosbox but now it's migrated to "Subiekt GT". I prefer old DOS program because it was easier to copy, just xcopy program folder to pendrive. New version uses MSSQL, and you have to reinstall and activate online. And database sometimes breaks.
- TeMPOraL 10y ago> I prefer old DOS program because it was easier to copy, just xcopy program folder to pendrive. New version uses MSSQL, and you have to reinstall and activate online. And database sometimes breaks. That's why I absolutely love SQLite. You get all the benefits of relational databases while still keeping data in plain files and not having to install system-wide stuff.
- yeahdef 10y agoWhen it doesn't matter, like probably with the inventory of a small grocery, SQLite can be a beauty
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- vertex-four 10y agoSQLite is more tested (as in code tests) than most other databases. Its downside is that you can essentially only use it from one app at a time, and not over a network.
- beached_whale 10y ago
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- madewulf 10y agoThis post and its comments totally feels like a post from Slashdot.
- davidgh 10y agoThis is irresponsible. That machine has been out of support for decades. I bet it's hacked and contributing every bit of its 1 MHz to a massive DDoS.
- skoczymroczny 10y agoMany shops/stores in Poland still use applications written for DOS for item management and stuff. Sometimes they get an upgrade, meaning they get a Windows install with the application running in DOSBox.
- Dowwie 10y ago6 hours ago there was a [post to the original story] (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12603909 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12603909). That HN article was LATER marked dupe by THIS gizmodo repost. This is essentially the opposite of what I'd expect to happen.
- zeveb 10y agoAnd that original story is better, with more details.
- rullopat 10y agoThe day that the C64 will break, they have to migrate to a “modern” solution that requires 10 Ghz CPUs with 1024 cores, 20 TB of RAM, that will be running on NodeJS that will have have a MongoDB database for transaction and that will communicate with a VBA script running on the same host in a virtual machine with Windows 2016 through Redis running in a container thanks to Kubernetes.
- zeveb 10y agoAnd they'll be lucky to get uptime upwards of 80%. And only lose 1% of their customers' data. Seriously, old software wasn't necessarily better (I well remember the old Mac system bomb dialogues!), but it certainly was leaner and forced not to be so complex.
- amiga-workbench 10y agoModern """""""enterprise""""""" solutions in a nutshell. Just throw in a shitty call-home activation DRM scheme and an authorisation server with 50% uptime too.
- forgottenpass 10y agoModern """""""enterprise""""""" solutions in a nutshell. lul. My Java project with a bunch of maven dependencies and a slightly unwieldy number of superfluous classes doesn't have anything on modern startup's tech fetishism to over-complicate operating a website "at scale" these days.
- TeMPOraL 10y agoFunny days, when modern web development turns out to be more bloated than Enterprise Java solutions.
- amiga-workbench 10y agoIts depressing. When the hell did it become normal to suck down 3mb of javascript and poke an API just to display some otherwise static text on a webpage.
- happy-go-lucky 10y agoIt's been about five years since I bought this laptop (refurbished ThinkPad) and I'm sure I'll be using the same laptop another five years down the road. Many people are still using relatively old hardware and it meets most or all of their needs.
- jwr 10y agoOlder usually means simple and simple is usually more reliable than complex. Think about it for a moment — these guys don't have a problem with auto-updates, viruses, or network intrusions. As I write this, I'm looking with growing trepidation at the menus on my new TV, especially the "Anti-Virus" section. Seriously?
- happy-go-lucky 10y ago> Older usually means simple and simple is usually more reliable than complex. Well said.
- TeMPOraL 10y ago> As I write this, I'm looking with growing trepidation at the menus on my new TV, especially the "Anti-Virus" section. Seriously? I remember various cheap movies in which a comptuer virus could in some way jump over to a human host. We're - slowly but surely - doing this to physical world now. I can't wait for the smart chair, that is connected to the cloud to give me fitness stats (in reality it's connected so that the company can try and monetize your sitting patterns[0]), and that will end up being used to pwn your local network and clear your bank account. Fun times. [0] - also literally bringing your butt to the cloud, without the need for cloud-to-butt browser extension.
- tomatsu 10y ago> I'm looking with growing trepidation at the menus on my new TV, especially the "Anti-Virus" section. Some of those "smart" TVs even have a camera and microphone. Your TV could be spying on you. Isn't that nice?
- TeMPOraL 10y agoThat's pretty much straight out of Orwell's 1984.
- orly_bookz 10y ago1984's technology has pretty much become a joke at this point. Who cares about your TV watching you when you broadcast your every move all day long, your spending habits are tracked and analyzed, and a passive global actor could turn your phone mic on just about any time?
- 127001brewer 10y agoI still have a Commodore 64 with its original box and booklet (which includes lessons in programming with BASIC).
- amiga-workbench 10y agoI've got mine setup at work in the meeting room http://mos6581.com/pictures/commodore-64/desk.jpg http://mos6581.com/pictures/commodore-64/desk.jpg I keep my IBM PC setup at home http://mos6581.com/pictures/5170-canvas/DCSF0009.jpg http://mos6581.com/pictures/5170-canvas/DCSF0009.jpg
- 127001brewer 10y agoAwesome - I used to have the disk drive and drawing pad ("KoalaPad")[0], but, unfortunately, those were thrown out a long time ago. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KoalaPad https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KoalaPad
- oneeyedpigeon 10y agoYou've really looked after those computers — nice job :)
- tech2 10y agoOooh, leaf-spring or micro-switch Competition Pro? I loved my leaf-spring one, it was built like a tank. When friends destroyed their Quickshot IIs in Daley Thompson's Olympic Challenge, mine just kept on trucking :)
- amiga-workbench 10y agoIts leaf-spring, personally I find them a bit unresponsive compared to the micro-switch models.
- tech2 10y agoOh, sure, I probably pulled that thing apart several times over its life-span, but I loathed the clicking and lack of reliability of the micro-switch based sticks.
- honkhonkpants 10y agoThis doesn't even strike me as being all that old. I still see plenty of IBM 3270 systems in warehouses and suchlike places in the USA. Those are at least as old as a C64.
- nickpsecurity 10y agoA local chain whose computer rebooted showed it to be using IBM's OS for POS. Last copywrite was 1999. I found out that it was an customized version of Concurrent DOS. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concurrent_DOS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concurrent_DOS Its history is quite amusing compared to some other OS's with better design. Last I heard was that the company's bigger stores upgraded to Fujitsu Linux (???) that runs that DOS system in an emulated or extended way. The backend is SCO Linux and mainframes. The self-checkouts, per the techs, run on Windows Embedded for GUI, the DOS thing emulated in there somehow, and a connection to backends. It's clear they keep going out of their way with more complex designs and configurations to prevent replacing that relatively-simple DOS app. Hilarious.
- ageofwant 10y agoI glued a raspberry pi to the back of an old vga monitor I use in the garage to look up stuff on the tubes while pottering. There is no reason why that setup won't still be going strong in 20 years, no moving parts, passive cooling. Very much the same for the commodore I recon. The tubes of course will move on tech-wise while the pi will get a few years of updates before 2030's firefox is a bit to far for a 2005 arm processor. Another 10 years may pass before a significant number of sites becomes inaccessible on a 10 year old browser. And then it will still be useful as a commodore emulator.
- happy-go-lucky 10y agoCopy-pasting one of the replies from the page: Reminds me of something my mom did a few weeks ago. She got a scam call from some guy saying he was with Microsoft and he detected a virus on her computer. (First clue it was a scam? They have an iMac. Why would Microsoft be calling?) My mom started playing dumb and saying, “You mean my Commodore has a virus?” “What?” “Yes! I have a Commodore 64!” “Uh..Do you have Windows?” “Well, of course! I can look through them and see the birds outside! My cats LOVE my windows...But I don’t let them up by my computer after someone told me that computers have mice.” “Uhm...Ma’am...Is there someone else there?” “Nope! Just me, my 12 cats, and my 4 dogs!” The guy hung up on her at that point. :)
- beamatronic 10y agoGood on your mom. I am always curious about these scam call centers. How do they staff up? Do they place an ad in the paper? Are the people who make these calls normal folks like you or I who wake up in the morning, commute to the office, sit in a cubicle and make these calls?
- happy-go-lucky 10y agoNormal folks wouldn't do jobs involving trickery.
- na85 10y ago"Normal" is culturally-defined.
- emp_zealoth 10y agoWait, what about fraudulent "financial advisors" that will happily trash you for some extra profit? Wells Fargo? Just the semi-recent stuff...
- jasonkostempski 10y agoUgh, what did Wells Fargo do?... Oh, fantastic, now I have to go see if I have any accounts I didn't open. I wonder if I'll ever see the day where I'm sold off to some random company and find out they're actually running an honest business with quality products.
- achr2 10y agoAre there any real-time operating systems out there currently that both run on modern hardware (maybe a raspberry Pi) and offer a simple programming option (not necessarily Basic, but something similarly approachable)?
- hrgeek 10y agoWow, that has my story beat. A few weeks ago I was shopping at a football (soccer) gear shop and the man running it rang me up on a computer he’s had since 1994. I want to say it was a Packard Bell, but I’m not sure about that. He had to manually type in the product code of each item I bought, and then printed out a receipt on a dot-matrix printer. Then he swiped my credit card on his iPhone to complete the transaction.
- WalterBright 10y agoI tried powering up some of my old 20-30 year old computers I'd stowed in the basement. Only one of them booted up, the rest had various POST failures, some even would make snapping noises and emit smoke. Older mechanical parts like drives have grease in them which dries out and the moving parts freeze together. I suspect it is the result of bad capacitors that decay over time, but nevertheless it is disappointing.
- WalterBright 10y agoBTW, I've found that throwing a hard disk drive in a drawer as a backup doesn't work very well. If it's never powered up for a few years it'll not power up anymore. The only solution that has worked for me is to recopy the backups every few months at least. I've never had CD/DVD rot, but the capacity it too low to use them as backups. I also just buy new drives every couple of years or so and copy everything forward. Some of my older drives are not even recognized by modern BIOSes.
- CannisterFlux 10y agoThey mention this phenomenon often on the RCR podcast http://rcrpodcast.com/ http://rcrpodcast.com/ the problem tends to be the power supplies going wrong, causing surges that fry the computers. New modern power supplies for old computers is their recommendation, rather than risk using the old supply and damaging good hardware. Too late now though!
- WalterBright 10y agoThat's good to know, but as you say, too late :-(
- mrbill 10y agoSurprised nobody's mentioned the filter manufacturer in Conroe, TX that was still using an IBM 402 and punched cards as recently as three years ago. http://www.chron.com/news/article/xx-4459714.php http://www.chron.com/news/article/xx-4459714.php https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pxCZ35y3O04 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pxCZ35y3O04
- syntex 10y agoIt survived a flood, but how it survived all that industrial dust for so many years?
- blakeyrat 10y agoIt's a Commodore 64. It has no moving parts (I assume the disk drive isn't ever touched) and the CPU doesn't really produce enough heat for cooling to be an issue. The story would be perfect if it were an original C-64 instead of the C-64C redesigned variant.
- userbinator 10y agoCommodore 64 software is still being developed quite actively by hobbyists, in the form of demoscene productions: http://www.pouet.net/prodlist.php?platform%5B%5D=Commodore+64&page=1 http://www.pouet.net/prodlist.php?platform%5B%5D=Commodore+6... I recommend anyone curious about retrocomputing to watch a few demos --- it can be quite surprising to see what can be done on hardware orders of magnitude less powerful than available today.
- happy-go-lucky 10y agoImpressive.
- nocman 10y agoMost impressive. :-D (sorry, watched Empire again recently and couldn't resist)
- bitmapbrother 10y agoAt first I thought it was a Commodore 128 because of its form factor. I never knew the 64 came in that form factor as well.
- happy-go-lucky 10y agoI think there still is and will be a market for systems with as few resources as possible, as long as they meet most computing needs.
- JunkDNA 10y agoMy uncle still does inventory for his business (small dancewear retailer) on an Apple II. I believe he recently "upgraded" to the IIgs because he started having trouble getting parts.
- kilroy123 10y agoAt least you don't need to worry about them fixing something that doesn't need fixing.
- headmelted 10y agoIn the late nineties I used to work at a Quasar centre (a type of laser tag), and the control system was a two-up DOS display built out of ASCII characters. Even then, we joked about how old the computer was (a 386 IIRC, a long time back now). It still strikes me that while the hardware in the packs failed pretty often, I can't recall a single crash in that software the entire time I worked with it. I suspect in retrospect it was statically linked with few to no dependencies, which probably helped a lot. EDIT: I'm even older than I realized. Shit.
- jo909 10y agoNot to be too nitpicky, but it is not used to run "the auto shop". It is essentially part of a drive shaft balancing machine. We should think of it as the embedded controller and display of the machine to understand why nobody would replace it while it is still working. And I'm sure there are plenty of old machines around where some electronics inside are literally or very similar to general purpose computers of the era. But often the physical integration into the machine hides this. Nevertheless impressive this thing is still running!
- tiben_ 10y agoThere was a similar case of an Amiga used to control GRPS heat and AC in a school: http://woodtv.com/2015/06/11/1980s-computer-controls-grps-heat-and-ac/ http://woodtv.com/2015/06/11/1980s-computer-controls-grps-he...
- zepesm 10y agoBtw, there's first video: http://www.trojmiasto.pl/wiadomosci/Warszatat-samochodowy-zaslynal-dzieki-26-letniemu-komputerowi-Commodore-n106004.html http://www.trojmiasto.pl/wiadomosci/Warszatat-samochodowy-za...