4 ms·

Incredibly common. There are industrial control systems in all sorts of factories that run hardware for which only DOS (XP is common too) drivers exist. The co

by dsl 10y ago

Incredibly common. There are industrial control systems in all sorts of factories that run hardware for which only DOS (XP is common too) drivers exist. The companies that make most of these systems are out of business (mostly VARs that have a lifespan of 5-10 years), and nobody wants to retool a $3 million assembly line just to upgrade an OS. Edit: I can think of a dozen times I woke up in the middle of the night to drive 20 miles to fix a DOS machine to get a plant working again. This is amazing.

rashkov 10y ago
Could you relate how you go about fixing a DOS machine? I'm imagining that technical experts get paid a lot of money and get flown across the country to get critical assembly lines working again. Am I far off?
- dsl 10y ago
  This was many years ago, so it was mostly reboots, reconfiguring settings, and things like that. But a good friend of mine has a very awesome job: he is employed by a very large manufacturing company that makes consumer products. They have dozens of plants all over north america, most of which run machines from companies that are out of business or the lines are no longer supported. When one of these antiquated machines break and the on-site service techs can't fix it or don't have spares they call him in. He will basically pull an old ISA card out of a machine, troubleshoot what broke, and replace board level components. He has a stash of old harddrives from eBay. Every version of old software you can imagine. In a few cases he has made new controller boards completely from scratch (including dumping firmware off of chips and flashing it on to new ones). When you are losing $200k an hour with a line down, "screw it I'll make a new one from scratch" isn't a silly response to the plant manager.
  - jeffdubin 10y ago
    When the possibly of losing $200k an hour with a line down even exists, "screw it, I'll have a few spares made" seems like it would be a less silly idea the plant manager might want to consider.
    - Natsu 10y ago
      You'd think so and in some cases you'd be right, but plant managers can pick the strangest things to be tight about. I remember fighting to get some UPSes on important machines once upon a time. I don't remember going even one single summer without having a power outage. In fact, there were normally several per year.
    - weavie 10y ago
      Surely if you could lose $200k an hour, you would want to ensure you have spares for absolutely everything already on site before the problems occur. Redundancy is an amazing thing.
      - bpizzi 10y ago
        It depends on whether we're speaking of turnover or profit. An average profit of 200K$/h for a single production line must be very rare (but it may exist). You're almost always not really 'loosing' 200K$ (otoh you'll surely be late in delivering your customers, and that may be valuable, think 'late delivering fees'). When you're 'only' earning an average 20K$/h (10% profit is an ok number I would say, but it may be far less if it's a common finished good), then it may have sens not to pursue buying couples of every single spare part you should have. The full price for always having in stock working spare parts for 100% of a 3M$ production line could be well in the tens of hundreds per month. At the end you're cutting your profit and that's the last thing you want to report to the board, as a plant manager.
  - MrBuddyCasino 10y ago
    > "screw it I'll make a new one from scratch" That guy must have had a steady hand and be really quick with the soldering iron. Making a new controller board while a 200k $ / hour line is down, well I always suspected my job was boring, now I know.
- Natsu 10y ago
  I can't speak for GP, but in my case, I'd run chkdisk or possibly "reimage" the thing. And when I say "reimage" I mean that I'd run an XCOPY script I had that copied the last known-good backup from a Novell share, after which I'd boot from a DOS floppy and do a sys c: I eventually made a batch file called 'fix' that would do the more common fixes and had them run that without bothering me.
  - insulanian 10y ago
    Novel network share brings back memories :) I had a machine hosting it, with dead BIOS battery. Every time it restarts, date/time had to be adjusted. Luckily, as I had already been fiddling with Turbo Pascal at the time, I made a tool to prompt the user to enter the date/time and have put it in autoexec.bat to run before NetWare does. Worked :) I used to hate it though, as I was dealing with it at the time when Windows Server was already becoming standard in the enterprise environment.
- flomo 10y ago
  If only that were true... "Fixing a DOS machine" used to be the entry level skillset to get into IT. At this point, the issue is more faded memories than finding the people who did it. (My first real IT job was creating the DOS configurations for IBM ThinkPads at F100 corporation. Prior to that I was a total point-n-click Apple guy who was into DTP. If I could write a bullet-proof CONFIG.SYS, a lot other people could too. Those ThinkPads were weird too, some of them had more devices than available IRQs, including a "mwave" DSP, so you had to create boot menus. Plus, they were running token ring, and there was actually a relevant difference between ISA and PC AT.)
- rangibaby 10y ago
  > Could you relate how you go about fixing a DOS machine? CTRL + ALT + DELETE and a dog-earred copy of "DOS for Dummies"?
  - Natsu 10y ago
    It's hilarious because that's like the only DOS book that was even findable. And I actually gave that book to some of the maintenance techs who were struggling with "install instructions" they were getting from the devs. When I say "install instructions" of course, I mean they were told to type something like: c: cd \foo cd \bar cd \baz copy a:\wuzzle.exe And sometimes they'd typo something and get completely confused.
    - scraft 10y ago
      Well there is a lot to be confused about, in the above example, I should imagine the intention was to NOT include a blackslash before bar and baz (otherwise the end result is changing the directory to 'baz' on the root of the C drive, meaning the cd to \foo and \bar and redundant).
      - Natsu 10y ago
        Oops, that's me misremembering. I haven't had to use DOS regularly for some time now.
tracker1 10y ago
Not sure if it's still the case, but I remember a Radio station setting up new computers, but that specifically had to have ISA/VESA slots in order to run a particular set of older hardware, and had to run Windows 98 because of the DOS drivers/software. The card itself was tens of thousands in investment (including software licensing), so they didn't want to spend that much replacing it with something newer. It was an AMD 586@133mhz iirc, with a lot of ram for the hardware. Rather old design at the time (around 2000-2003, the past bleeds together after a while), and still surprised that someone would take that route. But I'm not surprised that an organization would do similarly today. I know of CNC machines with similarly legacy requirements (XP) that are still run today.
giancarlostoro 10y ago
Curiosity: Do any of these legacy setups use FreeDOS? Curious to know how much compatibility FreeDOS has to DOS itself.
- snerbles 10y ago
  I've encountered some newer systems running FreeDOS, which includes controllers, HMIs and along with some vendor-provided USB boot tools. In time these will become legacy systems. In new deployments these non-PLC industrial systems are some combination of CE, XP, or very rarely 7. Linux is starting to gain traction with some Rockwell touch panels, but your typical vendor is loathe to try anything new. If software innovation were left to the industrial vendors, we'd still be on parchment and punch cards.
speeder 10y ago
By the way, it is not just unwillingness to upgrade. Microsoft trying to push the industry in a certain direction outright banned (or made very annoying) lots of tech after Windows XP. Example: Post-winXP is very hard to make decent parallel port stuff. Post-winXP you can't use dedicated hardware to calculate 3D audio (unless you do it in a funky way, like AMD failed attempt that was by adding a audio chip to the GPU and using the fact that HDMI must output audio...) Post-winXP several graphics features that favour CRTs were removed too, using CRT in Windows7+ is a pain, many people think CRT suck compared to flat panels because they never saw a CRT being used properly. And the list goes on... In my particular case I know of this stuff because I once tried to start a company that make arcade (of the wood cabinet kind) games. It is completely non-viable with Windows after WinXP...

by dsl 10y ago

rashkov 10y ago

Could you relate how you go about fixing a DOS machine? I'm imagining that technical experts get paid a lot of money and get flown across the country to get critical assembly lines working again. Am I far off?

dsl 10y ago
This was many years ago, so it was mostly reboots, reconfiguring settings, and things like that. But a good friend of mine has a very awesome job: he is employed by a very large manufacturing company that makes consumer products. They have dozens of plants all over north america, most of which run machines from companies that are out of business or the lines are no longer supported. When one of these antiquated machines break and the on-site service techs can't fix it or don't have spares they call him in. He will basically pull an old ISA card out of a machine, troubleshoot what broke, and replace board level components. He has a stash of old harddrives from eBay. Every version of old software you can imagine. In a few cases he has made new controller boards completely from scratch (including dumping firmware off of chips and flashing it on to new ones). When you are losing $200k an hour with a line down, "screw it I'll make a new one from scratch" isn't a silly response to the plant manager.
- jeffdubin 10y ago
  When the possibly of losing $200k an hour with a line down even exists, "screw it, I'll have a few spares made" seems like it would be a less silly idea the plant manager might want to consider.
  - Natsu 10y ago
    You'd think so and in some cases you'd be right, but plant managers can pick the strangest things to be tight about. I remember fighting to get some UPSes on important machines once upon a time. I don't remember going even one single summer without having a power outage. In fact, there were normally several per year.
  - weavie 10y ago
    Surely if you could lose $200k an hour, you would want to ensure you have spares for absolutely everything already on site before the problems occur. Redundancy is an amazing thing.
    - bpizzi 10y ago
      It depends on whether we're speaking of turnover or profit. An average profit of 200K$/h for a single production line must be very rare (but it may exist). You're almost always not really 'loosing' 200K$ (otoh you'll surely be late in delivering your customers, and that may be valuable, think 'late delivering fees'). When you're 'only' earning an average 20K$/h (10% profit is an ok number I would say, but it may be far less if it's a common finished good), then it may have sens not to pursue buying couples of every single spare part you should have. The full price for always having in stock working spare parts for 100% of a 3M$ production line could be well in the tens of hundreds per month. At the end you're cutting your profit and that's the last thing you want to report to the board, as a plant manager.
- MrBuddyCasino 10y ago
  > "screw it I'll make a new one from scratch" That guy must have had a steady hand and be really quick with the soldering iron. Making a new controller board while a 200k $ / hour line is down, well I always suspected my job was boring, now I know.
Natsu 10y ago
I can't speak for GP, but in my case, I'd run chkdisk or possibly "reimage" the thing. And when I say "reimage" I mean that I'd run an XCOPY script I had that copied the last known-good backup from a Novell share, after which I'd boot from a DOS floppy and do a sys c: I eventually made a batch file called 'fix' that would do the more common fixes and had them run that without bothering me.
- insulanian 10y ago
  Novel network share brings back memories :) I had a machine hosting it, with dead BIOS battery. Every time it restarts, date/time had to be adjusted. Luckily, as I had already been fiddling with Turbo Pascal at the time, I made a tool to prompt the user to enter the date/time and have put it in autoexec.bat to run before NetWare does. Worked :) I used to hate it though, as I was dealing with it at the time when Windows Server was already becoming standard in the enterprise environment.
flomo 10y ago
If only that were true... "Fixing a DOS machine" used to be the entry level skillset to get into IT. At this point, the issue is more faded memories than finding the people who did it. (My first real IT job was creating the DOS configurations for IBM ThinkPads at F100 corporation. Prior to that I was a total point-n-click Apple guy who was into DTP. If I could write a bullet-proof CONFIG.SYS, a lot other people could too. Those ThinkPads were weird too, some of them had more devices than available IRQs, including a "mwave" DSP, so you had to create boot menus. Plus, they were running token ring, and there was actually a relevant difference between ISA and PC AT.)
rangibaby 10y ago
> Could you relate how you go about fixing a DOS machine? CTRL + ALT + DELETE and a dog-earred copy of "DOS for Dummies"?
- Natsu 10y ago
  It's hilarious because that's like the only DOS book that was even findable. And I actually gave that book to some of the maintenance techs who were struggling with "install instructions" they were getting from the devs. When I say "install instructions" of course, I mean they were told to type something like: c: cd \foo cd \bar cd \baz copy a:\wuzzle.exe And sometimes they'd typo something and get completely confused.
  - scraft 10y ago
    Well there is a lot to be confused about, in the above example, I should imagine the intention was to NOT include a blackslash before bar and baz (otherwise the end result is changing the directory to 'baz' on the root of the C drive, meaning the cd to \foo and \bar and redundant).
    - Natsu 10y ago
      Oops, that's me misremembering. I haven't had to use DOS regularly for some time now.

tracker1 10y ago

Not sure if it's still the case, but I remember a Radio station setting up new computers, but that specifically had to have ISA/VESA slots in order to run a particular set of older hardware, and had to run Windows 98 because of the DOS drivers/software. The card itself was tens of thousands in investment (including software licensing), so they didn't want to spend that much replacing it with something newer. It was an AMD 586@133mhz iirc, with a lot of ram for the hardware. Rather old design at the time (around 2000-2003, the past bleeds together after a while), and still surprised that someone would take that route. But I'm not surprised that an organization would do similarly today. I know of CNC machines with similarly legacy requirements (XP) that are still run today.

giancarlostoro 10y ago

Curiosity: Do any of these legacy setups use FreeDOS? Curious to know how much compatibility FreeDOS has to DOS itself.

snerbles 10y ago
I've encountered some newer systems running FreeDOS, which includes controllers, HMIs and along with some vendor-provided USB boot tools. In time these will become legacy systems. In new deployments these non-PLC industrial systems are some combination of CE, XP, or very rarely 7. Linux is starting to gain traction with some Rockwell touch panels, but your typical vendor is loathe to try anything new. If software innovation were left to the industrial vendors, we'd still be on parchment and punch cards.

speeder 10y ago

By the way, it is not just unwillingness to upgrade. Microsoft trying to push the industry in a certain direction outright banned (or made very annoying) lots of tech after Windows XP. Example: Post-winXP is very hard to make decent parallel port stuff. Post-winXP you can't use dedicated hardware to calculate 3D audio (unless you do it in a funky way, like AMD failed attempt that was by adding a audio chip to the GPU and using the fact that HDMI must output audio...) Post-winXP several graphics features that favour CRTs were removed too, using CRT in Windows7+ is a pain, many people think CRT suck compared to flat panels because they never saw a CRT being used properly. And the list goes on... In my particular case I know of this stuff because I once tried to start a company that make arcade (of the wood cabinet kind) games. It is completely non-viable with Windows after WinXP...