3 ms·

What I don't get is, if this multi-decade-old software is valuable enough to be used today, why isn't it valuable enough for someone to have written a replaceme

by ikeboy 9y ago

What I don't get is, if this multi-decade-old software is valuable enough to be used today, why isn't it valuable enough for someone to have written a replacement in the intervening decades? Surely every plant like this would pay something for the ability to run on modern OSes, and presumably there are enough plants using this kind of software to recoup the cost of development?

jdblair 9y ago
People who run industrial processes tend to make careful, conservative choices. "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" is the golden rule, since any downtime can cost serious money. This means staying on old, proven systems is favored over upgrading for the sake of upgrading, even if there are possible improvements. Context: I used to work on solar power management and control, and developed manufacturing processes to build our hardware.
mintplant 9y ago
I wouldn't count on that. Battle-testedness can be a feature, and a new software package means new training for those tasked with maintaining the system. The old one is a known quantity.
icegreentea2 9y ago
Well, there's two parts to your question, if there is a demand, why isn't there a supply, and is there really a demand? For the first part, if the original company has gone out of business, and enough records and knowledge lost and scattered, then it'd actually potentially be very difficult for a new group to identify what the original customers were, much less identify what the potential size of market is today. That's quite a lot of risk to take on (in my mind anyways). Industrial automation is one of those things that people don't openly disclose in a way that makes it easy to canvas the market cheaply.
rahimnathwani 9y ago
This isn't software that you can just install and use. This type of software is tightly integrated with the hardware in the factory or distribution center. So, even if there were free software which did the same thing, it would cost a lot of time and money to replace the old, already-working system. Moreover, for software that was put in place 20 years ago, it's likely that some of the functionality is unknown, i.e. the whole system works together, but exactly what is being done by each piece of software isn't fully understood by anyone still at the company. So it would require a bunch of work to even spec a replacement. So it's totally rational to keep the existing, working system, even if you need a dedicated PC to administer it. (Source: I was in a similar situation ~20 years ago.)
zbuttram 9y ago
In some cases there may be replacements, but they would require newer hardware as well (think expensive lab equipment, not just workstations), which brings the cost much higher than simply replacing the software. My father's environmental testing lab is currently in this predicament, but they finally got rid of their last Windows 3.11 (and older) machines a couple of years ago so it's not like they aren't trying, it just needs to happen incrementally.
boznz 9y ago
The bagging control system at my customers seafood factory still uses DOS, it controls the hardware through 2 serial ports, the hardware has been updated several times since the 80's, There are no drivers or security, just base DOS formatted hard disk and autoexec.bat with a single exe program being called, I just clone the hard disk for them when its time for an update and keep the old PC around for backup. I've thought of reverse engineering the software but to tell the truth the program and the machine it controls were just built very well and so long as we have spare hardware it could go forever. Due to driver problems I'm not sure you could even build a system these days that would be guaranteed future proofed for 30+ years.
weaksauce 9y ago
They can certainly buy new plcs and new hmis to interface together and do things but it's not like a program written for one plc from one manufacturer is interchangeable with one another. the plc code is fairly close to assembly language and it's written for one particular plc with a particular wiring. I could do it but it does take time and money to complete and even then you lose a bit of institutional knowledge codified by the original codebase. Having delved into plc programs built by others(even with comments that get stripped out if you don't have the original source file and instead download it from the plc directly) it's not easy to do. They certainly do still sell new plcs for industrial automation but the programs are typically bespoke.

by ikeboy 9y ago

jdblair 9y ago

People who run industrial processes tend to make careful, conservative choices. "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" is the golden rule, since any downtime can cost serious money. This means staying on old, proven systems is favored over upgrading for the sake of upgrading, even if there are possible improvements. Context: I used to work on solar power management and control, and developed manufacturing processes to build our hardware.

mintplant 9y ago

I wouldn't count on that. Battle-testedness can be a feature, and a new software package means new training for those tasked with maintaining the system. The old one is a known quantity.

icegreentea2 9y ago

Well, there's two parts to your question, if there is a demand, why isn't there a supply, and is there really a demand? For the first part, if the original company has gone out of business, and enough records and knowledge lost and scattered, then it'd actually potentially be very difficult for a new group to identify what the original customers were, much less identify what the potential size of market is today. That's quite a lot of risk to take on (in my mind anyways). Industrial automation is one of those things that people don't openly disclose in a way that makes it easy to canvas the market cheaply.

rahimnathwani 9y ago

This isn't software that you can just install and use. This type of software is tightly integrated with the hardware in the factory or distribution center. So, even if there were free software which did the same thing, it would cost a lot of time and money to replace the old, already-working system. Moreover, for software that was put in place 20 years ago, it's likely that some of the functionality is unknown, i.e. the whole system works together, but exactly what is being done by each piece of software isn't fully understood by anyone still at the company. So it would require a bunch of work to even spec a replacement. So it's totally rational to keep the existing, working system, even if you need a dedicated PC to administer it. (Source: I was in a similar situation ~20 years ago.)

zbuttram 9y ago

In some cases there may be replacements, but they would require newer hardware as well (think expensive lab equipment, not just workstations), which brings the cost much higher than simply replacing the software. My father's environmental testing lab is currently in this predicament, but they finally got rid of their last Windows 3.11 (and older) machines a couple of years ago so it's not like they aren't trying, it just needs to happen incrementally.

boznz 9y ago

The bagging control system at my customers seafood factory still uses DOS, it controls the hardware through 2 serial ports, the hardware has been updated several times since the 80's, There are no drivers or security, just base DOS formatted hard disk and autoexec.bat with a single exe program being called, I just clone the hard disk for them when its time for an update and keep the old PC around for backup. I've thought of reverse engineering the software but to tell the truth the program and the machine it controls were just built very well and so long as we have spare hardware it could go forever. Due to driver problems I'm not sure you could even build a system these days that would be guaranteed future proofed for 30+ years.

weaksauce 9y ago

They can certainly buy new plcs and new hmis to interface together and do things but it's not like a program written for one plc from one manufacturer is interchangeable with one another. the plc code is fairly close to assembly language and it's written for one particular plc with a particular wiring. I could do it but it does take time and money to complete and even then you lose a bit of institutional knowledge codified by the original codebase. Having delved into plc programs built by others(even with comments that get stripped out if you don't have the original source file and instead download it from the plc directly) it's not easy to do. They certainly do still sell new plcs for industrial automation but the programs are typically bespoke.