8 ms·

When I was still working at Arecibo Observatory, there was definitely a couple systems running Win95 that were considered data critical. And they were still run

• ColanR 6y ago
  Sounds like their system works. If that 486 hardware lasted 20 years already, seems like there's a pretty good chance it'll outlast most of the modern stuff it would be replaced with.
  • non-entity 6y ago
    I suppose its fine as long as its not connected to the internet.
    • owenmarshall 6y ago
      Do you suspect there are any 0day/worms still targeting Windows 95 systems? I wonder if an unpatched Win95 box is actually safer than an unpatched modern Windows box.
      • PopsiclePete 6y ago
        >Do you suspect there are any 0day/worms still targeting Windows 95 systems? You'd be surprised how much malware is "legacy" 32-bit and works without issue on WinXP. A lot of malware even shies away from Unicode API's and specifically calls out the *A Win32 API functions. Considering the Win32 API is backwards compatible to a fault, I don't see why modern malware couldn't absolutely wreck a Win9x box.
        • owenmarshall 6y ago
          Sure – once the malware lands. But I doubt anyone is going after any Win95 vulnerabilities, so how does it get on the box to start chomping?
          • jasomill 6y ago
            Loaded from the boot sector of any floppy that happens to be present when the system is restarted, unless the boot order has been changed from factory defaults and the (possibly very old) coin cell powering NVRAM holds sufficient charge to retain these changes when (if) the system is ever powered off.
          • PeterisP 6y ago
            In general, attacks (e.g. most ransomware campaigns) are not automated malware spreading on its own, they involve people. If it's accessible on a network (which is the big 'if'), then it's obvious on any scan that it's a Win95 machine, and then you can try to look up a vulnerability for any exposed service. For example, if file sharing is running, then all the SMB vulnerabilities (e.g. EternalBlue and friends) apply also to Win95 systems, and I'm not sure if Windows 95 had a patch made, backported and issued for them.
        • badsectoracula 6y ago
          Yes, but Windows XP was in widespread use until recently and is still in use in a lot of places. I don't know where "netmarketshare.com" takes their user statistics (Google just used them when i searched for that) but it reports "1.26%" for Windows XP, which i think is still a large number. There are still so many users of Windows XP that Microsoft released a critical security patch last year despite XP being official EOL for years now.
        • TillE 6y ago
          Windows XP (NT kernel) and 9x are totally different OSes, using totally different kernels. They share some API, but not really the interesting parts. I work on software that still supports XP with only a little pain. Visual Studio 2019 will still install the necessary toolchain if you ask nicely. Targeting Windows 95/98 in 2020 sounds like a nightmare.
      • goalieca 6y ago
        That floppy disk controller is the only way into the box and isn't nearly as vulnerable as a modern usb controller since there's no smarts!! The windows 95 system is going to be safer than a patched windows 10 on the network for their use case.
        • vlovich123 6y ago
          For the common-case en masse compromises, not a concern. For targeted attacks it can still be an issue. Stuxnet is an example of this where they compromised an air-gapped system. Stuxnet was obviously extremely sophisticated, technically and for the overall operation, but the principles still apply. Also people frequently misjudge how big of a target they may be & what their risk profile really is (not saying for this use-case specifically, just in general).
      • projektfu 6y ago
        Win95 is running as root by default. Any process can open another's memory. It has the same registry entry as Windows NT for running a program on startup. The keylogging API is basically the same. The IShellFolder and IWebBrowser interfaces are identical, so as long as the malware didn't request specific classes or features that are outside the realm of Windows 95, it can probably do pretty well. Luckily, Internet Explorer 3 doesn't support TLS.
        • anthk 6y ago
          Except for the Ex functions. I wonder if a malware can be run under KernelEx.
    • ajford 6y ago
      IIRC, the machine was on an isolated equipment network with no external access for some time, but the network drivers would often cause some kind of conflict with the ISA interface card (and custom driver) so the network interface was disabled. So yeah, should be safe (and is likely no longer hardwired to the network).
  • fetbaffe 6y ago
    Risk is hardware related, finding replacement parts. But yes, the software part seem to work fine.
  • ajford 6y ago
    It works yes, but they were running out of spare parts when I left. That system's parts were on frequent Ebay searches, as it was becoming quite fragile. I think it was on a 3rd power supply and a second mobo or proc, can't quite remember. It was on a redundant on-line UPS as the last time it went completely off and was booted from cold, it ended up needing parts. So no, I'd say it's not likely to outlast modern replacements. Just had lots of support and organ transplants. Systems like that ultimately end up being a resource drain, as unlike modern hardware it's not simply wandering over to a retailer and buying standard replacement parts, but sourcing used or NOS parts and hoping they work, often requiring far more time and effort by someone who could be doing some other important task. The problem is that in open use observatories like Arecibo, a lot of equipment like that is put in place by third parties, but becomes our responsibility to maintain. But the science is important, so we maintain it as best we can.
    • drbojingle 6y ago
      Eventually, yes, it becomes a resource drain. If you want to know when, ask the finance people.
  • outworlder 6y ago
    > If that 486 hardware lasted 20 years already, seems like there's a pretty good chance it'll outlast most of the modern stuff it would be replaced with. Unlikely. Good quality 'modern stuff' has far better quality than what was available back then. Power supplies have gotten much better (and have more protections), as did motherboards with solid state capacitors. Older motherboards loved their electrolytic capacitors. Processors had less protections. Thermal monitoring was at its infancy. Memory sticks back then were very unreliable. As were hard drives. Then there's just a matter of age. If it has lasted 20 years, chances are it won't last much longer. It has probably lasted 20 years because it wasn't being powered on and off constantly. It most likely had stable power sources and - most important - a climate controlled environment with low amounts of dust.
    • phendrenad2 6y ago
      True, but people have backported modern hardware to that era. You can take a modern power supply and drop it into that PC, I'm almost sure.
    • toast0 6y ago
      A 486 system was built before the capacitor plague. Quality electrolytics may not last forever, but can last a long time. Also, built before RoHS and the reduced longevity of poorly formulated or poorly applied lead-free solders that were common for many years. Processors had less protections, and thermal monitoring was at its infancy because almost all the 486s wouldn't use enough power to cook themselves to death, even with passive heatsinks. I don't know about memory sticks and hard drives from that period. It's quite possible they've replaced the hard drive with compact flash or something too, which should be pretty reliable given they apparently only make a floppy disk's worth of data every day.
      • brundolf 6y ago
        I'd love to hear more about what "the capacitor plague" is
        • devenblake 6y ago
  • liability 6y ago
    After 20 years, might they be in territory beyond the far side of the 'bathtub curve'?
  • tartoran 6y ago
    > Sounds like their system works. If that 486 hardware lasted 20 years already, seems like there's a pretty good chance it'll outlast most of the modern stuff it would be replaced with. Surely it does make some sense, but think about the hardware suddenly breaking down and not finding what to replace it with. Even with spare parts it could be a pain as the old generation retires
    • LargoLasskhyfv 6y ago
      Just get an industrial board which provides ISA-slots and has something like http://www.vortex86.com/ http://www.vortex86.com/ on it.
      • non-entity 6y ago
        I actually was surprised to see these are made, as I considered getting one for a few projects. The ones I saw were pretty expensive with some being resold on ebay for just under a thousand dollars. Reading some reviews though it seems yoy have to be careful as not all the boards may support what you want. Apparently a good many don't support DMA.
        • LargoLasskhyfv 6y ago
          I thought about this, but let it stand. It can be tricky. I had to work with something like this a few years ago and managed. As I remember I had to get Scitech Display Doctor/Univbe from some abandonware sites to make use of the weird onboard VGA under Windown95. The ISA-card for the CNC-machine worked, it used DMA, among other things. It all worked, and was even more fluid to operate/program. The cost was just over 400EUR. (for the board) Anyways, it's industrial, the formfactor often does not fit existing cases and backpanels, but it's doable. More so than hunting ebay or similar for spares of dubious provenance. Only exception would be if the "App" and the board/card were designed so sloppily that they really only run on exactly that same hardware.
  • unixhero 6y ago
    This is due to the rule of antifragility. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antifragility https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antifragility
  • Jtsummers 6y ago
    I worked in an office with a similar setup that "worked", but it was very fragile. When the HDD started failing on the old 486 machine we scrambled to migrate as much as possible (including a few rewrites and ports of utility programs). We were lucky that our problem was the software not running on modern systems (for reasons), not a dependency on the hardware. Mostly we communicated with hardware systems via serial, so any computer with a serial port (or a USB-to-serial adapter, which are often unreliable) could be made to work if the software existed.
  • boogies 6y ago
    There’s a word for this concept, the ‘Lindy’ effect. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Lindy https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Lindy
  • DanBC 6y ago
    How are they doing backups of the software and data?
    • ajford 6y ago
      The entire disk (all 10s of GBs of it) was cloned and backed up as a disk image, and can be re-imaged whenever necessary. The data is copied off daily via floppy (don't get me started...) and is backed up on local network shares. The specifics of that weren't in my need-to-know and was managed by the IT group. The system was essentially stateless, so spinning it up from the image wasn't an issue, but the PC itself is essentially part of the "equipment", as it ran the custom drivers and it was specifically designed for that PC and a one-of-a-kind ISA card.
  • giancarlostoro 6y ago
    I wonder if it's even just as easy to just run some of that on VirtualBox / some hypervisor running Windows 95, that way they have access to modern replacement hardware.
  • tinus_hn 6y ago
    But there’s also a fair chance something will break and you can’t buy spare parts for museum pieces like this.
• leeter 6y ago
  Reading this... my first thought was "But newer x86 can.... oh right ISA..." then I googled for USB ISA slots... and they are apparently a thing. That doesn't mean someone wouldn't need to write a new driver but at least they could still use the cards.
  • kjs3 6y ago
    There are all sorts of USB-to-Foo interfaces, the vast majority of which implement whatever Foo is just barely good enough to say it works with a straight face. Like the USB-Serial adapters...most of them work ok at 9600,8,N, but trying 5-bit with 1.5 stop bits (something a 'real' PC serial port can be persuaded to do) and good luck. So, yeah, I'm sure that USB-ISA adapter probably works with that old 3Com ethernet card or that Soundblaster card that 'definitely' sounds better than anything else, but a custom card with custom software and probably unknown tolerance to variations from 'real' ISA? Good luck with that.
    • leeter 6y ago
      Oh probably and even if you did find one that works "well" you'd have to buy a ton of them to ensure you have backups. I'm well aware of the issues. But without an alternative or a grant to update the hardware what do you do? At some point the availability of period hardware with ISA slots is going to be prohibitively expensive.
      • kjs3 6y ago
        You can still buy new manufacture motherboards with ISA slots and modern processors. Intel still (or until recently) made ISA bridge chips for modern Southbridge chips. And it's something that a smallish FPGA could handle. There is a whole ecosystem of companies that recreate old-style motherboards for exactly this scenario. My brother's company does IT stuff for the manufacturing sector. Very conservative. I've worked with a number of his customers to source exactly this sort of thing. Years ago they asked my thoughts on an Italian made cloth dying machine the size of a bus with a DOS PC controller and a minimally documented ISA controller. A mid 7-figure US$ setup; the company that built it is long gone. We found a shop that supplied new motherboards, modern (at the time...P3/P4 era I think) with ISA slots the vendor guaranteed it would be every bit as slow and weird as a PC/AT. Migrated everrything over, the company bought a stack of motherboard spares new, and I think they're still using them. Now...you want a challenge? Migrating the proprietary, mostly undocumented software, all in Italian (we aren't native speakers...though my high school Latin occasionally helped) from an old ESDI disk to something, anything, else. That was much more interesting.
• nuccy 6y ago
  Currently I have a related task, a telescope is being operated using a set of old hardware (late 90s-early 00s) and same age software, due to current situation in case of lock-downs the observations are not performed, so the idea is to migrate everything into virtual machines with PCI forwarding, so that VNC/whatever other remote desktop software can allow remote operations. Does anyone have such an experience? What are the pitfalls? I plan use Xen or KVM.
  • FooHentai 6y ago
    I did something similar for an organisation that had a strange music licensing setup for pub jukebox machines. A significant portion of their business hinged on this one ancient DOS pc with custom hardware and a licensing dongle. Ultimately it comes down to whether you can get the inputs and outputs you need replicated/attached to the virtual machine and and exact copy of the machine itself into virtual form - the latter challenge can include having to do risky stuff like physically removing the source HDD to plug it into various interface converters and then taking an image from it using an intermediate machine that can read it. Depending on how your setup works you may run into issues with things like time precision within a VM - if high time accuracy is important in the work it’s doing you’ll need to put attention into ensuring VM time = real world time.
  • bayindirh 6y ago
    Some top of my head suggestions based on our experience: - Use Proxmox. Even free version can go a long way (because backing up VMs periodically is a good thing and Proxmox can do it fine). - If you're going to run Linux, run XFCE desktops with X2Go server. X2Go can work almost in any network condition. - Test PCI forwarding extremely well before taking the plunge. Especially if you're going to virtualize specially designed equipment. If it works, it's magic. If it doesn't then you're in big trouble. - If the PCI cards will be migrated from older equipment to newer one, test to see whether they work well with spread spectrum. If it doesn't make sure that the server you use allows disabling it.
• headmelted 6y ago
  The amount of questions I have about this would mean we’d be here for days but: How long ago did you work at Arecibo? What was it like? What did you do there? Did you ever... find.. anything that you can’t talk about? Blink twice if yes!!
  • ajford 6y ago
    If you're really curious, hit my profile and email me. Always happy to chat about AO and the fun stuff there. I was there for about 3 years and left around 2016. It was one of the best and most interesting places I've worked at so far. The people were great, the work was great, and I personally felt the work came with a huge feeling of accomplishment and made me feel like I was contributing to a better world by facilitating scientific progress. I was part of the Electronics Dept. which was ultimately responsible for the scientific hardware, the signal paths, and everything between. There were some people in Physical that were more responsible for the electro-mechanical stuff like motors and such. I was primarily responsible for assisting with the analog signal path and was considered a Receiver Specialist, but the latter half of my time there was spent writing a lot of digital control stuff for newer projects as I was the only one on staff at the time who had the skills and time to take those on. As for finding anything..... that's classified :p We did manage to talk to an old NASA satellite from the late 70s. The ISEE-3/ICE reboot project. Some details on Wikipedia here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Cometary_Explorer#Reboot_effort https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Cometary_Explore...
• lightlyused 6y ago
  Curious, how long ago was that? I visited last year and got a tour from Angel. Yea, they had a lot of old hardware.
  • ajford 6y ago
    When I left? Around 2016. I'm almost certain that '95 machine is still sitting in the Clock Room to this day. Man, I miss Angel, gotta shoot him an email sometime soon. Miss sitting around and chatting about ham radio with him!
• dangerboysteve 6y ago
  What did the ISA boards do? Also the name sounded familiar, this was the radio telescope which incurred damage recently.
  • ajford 6y ago
    The ISA board was a custom interface to a number of GPS receivers and some IO chips for time sync calibration and tracking for Pulsar astronomy. And yes, this is the one that recently suffered a cable failure that damaged the reflector.