2 ms·
> But still, it's a decade later and we don't seem to have made much progress. Despite all the "IIoT" buzzwords their marketing may spout, industrial vendors o
by snerbles 9y ago
> But still, it's a decade later and we don't seem to have made much progress.
Despite all the "IIoT" buzzwords their marketing may spout, industrial vendors operate a decade behind the software curve at best. Arcane proprietary stacks running atop XP, CE, ActiveX, and various flavors of DOS are still getting deployed in new industrial installations...often supported by vendors staffed by a hundred salescritters to every engineer, if they're lucky enough to have any staff remaining that wrote or understand the original product in the first place.
It's filled with dozens of mini-Oracles, each with licensing more insane than the next because your typical integrator will either run for the hills at the first sign of anything that isn't ladder logic or spew forth spaghetti garbage that makes INTERCAL look like the most pretentiously elegant Lisp. When you're the lone programmer on the team that even knows what Git is, you start to realize why nobody ever got fired for just buying Rockwell.
- evdev 9y agoThis is correct. The ActiveX is very, very real.
- jcranmer 9y agoAhh, the painful memories of writing the SCADA control software. In VBScript. The old system was running on VMS. The new system could be accessed via ActiveX control in an IE page. At least the plant network was sufficiently airgapped.
- noir_lord 9y ago> At least the plant network was sufficiently airgapped. The Iranians thought that as well.