Not directly related, but this reminded me of some reverse engineering work I did some years ago at a laboratory that was using a 17 year old, but still fully f

Not directly related, but this reminded me of some reverse engineering work I did some years ago at a laboratory that was using a 17 year old, but still fully functioning, medical eye scanner whose companion software was so old that it had become increasingly difficult to run it. The software was released in 1999 with only one minor update in 2001. Even the manufacturer had lost all instances of the software, and once we contacted them to ask for guidence, they were not able to give any and in fact ended asking us to send them the software so that they would have a copy of it. And so we decided to completely reverse engineer the serial data connection and recreate the analysis display. It did take around 3 months of work, with lots of testing, but we did it. Since then I often wonder how many medical devices are thrown out simply due to issues with the companion software, and how nice it would be if there was an initiative like this for writing FOSS drivers/software to interact with them.