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Russia’s Retro Lenin Museum Still Runs on Decades-Old Apple II Computers
- lb1lf 7y agoIf it gets the job done, it gets the job done. One of the CNC machines in our workshop was controlled by a MicroVAX until recently. Did what we asked it to.
- mac_was 7y agoExactly what I wanted to post.
- crtlaltdel 7y agoyeah worked with a win3.1 box for a long time that was never shutdown on purpose (on a ups and we had back up generators). we ran midi tests of our hw with it. it was shutdown permanently in some time in 2010.
- tambourine_man 7y agoThe problem is when it stops doing its job. How much are Apple II parts? How easy is it to find people with the know-how? How much do they charge? How about 10 years from now? Long term tech is hard. We haven't had time to figure it out yet.
- Aloha 7y agoThe Apple II is one of a few computers that you could build a brand new one from parts if needed, they're not complex machines.
- boznz 7y agoor run on an emulator
- Aloha 7y agothe article makes it clear that you need to interact with special cards to control the exhibits
- rdc12 7y agoThat problem could probably be solved using an FPGA (or even simpler tech)
- emilfihlman 7y agoGiven the specs, an AVR could do it.
- sehugg 7y agoHow easy is it to find people with the know-how? How much do they charge? I'd think you'd find dozens of qualified volunteers willing to work pro-bono to keep a Apple ][-powered museum running. How about 10 years from now? You'd find slightly fewer.
- stunt 7y agoStill safe to leave the old stuff running if they get the job done and you don't want to add any new feature to it. And make sure you build your new stuff on a future proof platform. It really depends on the roadmap.
- tombert 7y agoI do worry that the power consumption might be far too high for the amount of value you're getting out of it. I mean, a Raspberry Pi Zero probably has more computing power than an Apple II, while using a small fraction of the power. You could probably retrofit the software to work relatively well on an Apple II emulator on the Raspberry Pi, for that matter. Increasingly I've been getting a bit worried about these "it gets the job done" mentalities; are the environmental externalities actually being properly accounted for?
- vogre 7y agoThe cost of rewriting the software will surpass any energy costs of the working solution. Not to mention crafting the new hardware and utilizing old computer will harm ecology too.
- tombert 7y agoWell, as I said, potentially an Apple II emulator might actually do the job depending on what the software is doing. This might be a fun thing to compute the numbers on.
- vogre 7y ago> The Apple II personal computer was introduced in 1977. One of its features was a compact, fanless switching power supply, which provided 38W of power at 5, 12, -5, and -12 volts Unless you are using Apple 2 emulator on Raspberry Pi, you won't get any modern computer working on 38W. Actually it has less power consumption than a lightbulb that is needed to light up the room where it stands.
- petra 7y agoAren't newer CNC machines much more effective,and slowly replacing older machines ?
- forgottenpass 7y agoCNC is a way to control a tool, and the tools that can be controlled are so wide ranging that it's weird to talk about the efficacy of CNC, rather than the capabilities of the tool you're controlling.
- xyzzyz 7y agoMany CNC machines in operation are retrofits of WWII era manual lathes and mills. There are so many of those still in existence, and the demand for small scale machining is so small in the US these days that the market for high quality machining tools have effectively segmented into huge modern CNC machining centers worth hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars, and many decades old refurbished tools for small scale, simple one offs and hobbyist tools.
- HeyLaughingBoy 7y agoSometimes, sometimes not. CNC (as someone noted) is just a control mechanism. For some use cases, the cams and levers of a World War II-era Screw Machine are faster and far more cost effective than a new, or even used CNC mill/lathe. There are shops out there that will buy up old automated machine tools and dedicate each machine to a particular setup or product that they make in bulk. That 60 year-old hunk of cast iron and steel might have cost an eyewatering sum when it was new, but because CNC is all the rage now, it's available for the cost of scrap now and it may still be as precise as the day it was built.
- tenebrisalietum 7y agoRight there is the problem with a lot of newer things. It does things other than what you ask it to, like upload telemetry, consume your bandwidth to deliver advertisements, or reboot for updates.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- exhilaration 7y agoAl Eisenstat, who accompanied [Steve] Jobs, recalled him talking about creating AI simulations of Soviet revolutionaries: “The one thing we can’t do is to ask them a question and get their current thinking. Ahh, but in the future you are going to have artificial intelligence and you’ll be able to ask Mr. Lenin a question or Mr. Trotsky a question.”
- trhway 7y ago>in the future you are going to have artificial intelligence and you’ll be able to ask Mr. Lenin a question or Mr. Trotsky a question. giving the amount of Lenin's writings https://www.cmlt.ru/getUserImage?id=17690783 https://www.cmlt.ru/getUserImage?id=17690783 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Lenin_bibliography#Collected_Works https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Lenin_bibliography#Co... : "His Collected Works comprise 54 volumes, each of about 650 pages, translated into English in 45 volumes " i wonder what future we can already preview by training GPT-2 on it. Add to that a voice model built using his voice recordings and upload the combined model as a "Talk to/Ask Lenin" skill to Alexa... Caused the memory to dig out that USSR propaganda slogan - "Lenin is more alive than anyone living" (i kid you not - "Lenin zhivee vseh zhivyh").
- mikdman 7y agothe translation doesn’t seem correct to me. it would be more along the lines “if lenin is alive then everyone is alive”
- awiesenhofer 7y agoAh, I can relate. While not as old as these, all the interactive stations at my parents museum still run on ancient win nt 4 boxes connected via bnc. Guess who they call when one breaks again...
- tombert 7y agoI worked on at a company that was running all their billing software on DOS with FoxPro (I was there in 2012). We eventually "upgraded" them to a VM running OS/2 on a Windows XP machine (I wasn't able to get it working with DosBox or FreeDOS)...Management didn't want to give us budget to rewrite it in a modern language, sadly.
- coribuci 7y ago> ...Management didn't want to give us budget to rewrite it in a modern language, sadly. I fully agree with the management. The problem with software developers of today is that instead of being engineers and getting shit done they are more like script kiddies trying to do cool 1337 things. There are some golden rules in engineering: never touch a running system, if ain't broke, don't fix it and don't reinvent the wheel - just use it.
- lloydatkinson 7y agoOh god shut up already
- tombert 7y agoI don't think I agree with that at all. There aren't security updates, older hardware becomes harder and harder to get fixed. It's easy to say "if it ain't broke, don't fix it", but in effect everything is breaking all the time. Hard drives fail, processors burn out, security holes are discovered, and the more out-of-date something is, the harder it is to replace or fix. If there were periodic attempts to modernize stuff, the blow of this is less severe. Example, I'm sure the people running the Target POS devices five years ago had the mentality "if it ain't broke, don't fix it", and it led to a huge breach.
- Andrew_nenakhov 7y agoIt isn't called a retro museum for nothing! (also, this is very symbolic. every former soviet union citizen knows that Lenin foresaw the advent of thinking machines, calling this as inevitable as an apple falling down from a tree - from Lenin Collected Works, letter to Julius Martov, 1903)
- hybrids 7y agoIs there an English translation of this somewhere? I googled around and couldn't seem to find it.
- Andrew_nenakhov 7y agoIt is a made-up joke, partially grounded in a soviet tradition to supplement any thesis by some quote from Lenin Collected Works. Since Vladimir Ilyich had lots of opinions and was a very prolific writer - 5th edition of Collected Works ran 54 volumes 650 pages each - one could find virtually anything there. ANYTHING.
- aaaaaar 7y agoThat's what I thought of when I read this in George Orwell's "1984": "Big Brother is infallible and all-powerful. Every success, every achievement, every victory, every scientific discovery, all knowledge, all wisdom, all happiness, all virtue, are held to issue directly from his leadership and inspiration."
- rinchik 7y agoThere was a thread about how to write zero maintenance apps, feels related. Isolated, stuck in time envs are a must. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21192885 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21192885
- AzzieElbab 7y agoAbout 10 years ago I saw a Soviet clone of IBM/360 in a mid size Russian investment bank
- efrafa 7y agoElevetors in our building(SF fin. district) runs even older ones.
- craz8 7y agoBack in the 80s I worked in a place running on Apple IIs The biggest problem we had then was floppy disks physically wearing out, as they were running all day Did someone corner the market in 5 1/4 floppies to handle cases such as this? Does this museum have enough supply to keep running?
- jacobush 7y agoThere are floppy emulators now, they could use those. Also if the diskettes are read only once per boot, they don't get much wear.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- nikolay 7y agoThose probably are Pravetz 82 [0] - the Bulgarian clone of Apple ][. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pravetz_computers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pravetz_computers
- gattilorenz 7y agoI also thought so, but in the article it says they are original Apple IIs imported via a front company. Unrelated: I always found the II ][ and // naming so confusing...
- luismedel 7y agoI hope they don't update to Catalina if they want the old software to run /s
- Nr7 7y agoReminds me of this article about an old Amiga computer running the AC system for multiple schools: https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/infrastructure/a16010/30-year-old-computer-runs-school-heat/ https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/infrastructure/a...