3 ms·

While my nostalgia bone is tickled fiercely by this picture, I wonder what is the appeal of running SunOS these days. NetBSD shoud work on that machine, too, an

by krylon 3y ago

While my nostalgia bone is tickled fiercely by this picture, I wonder what is the appeal of running SunOS these days. NetBSD shoud work on that machine, too, and that would give you at least some modern features like a current OpenSSH, IPv6, an up to date software stack...

themoonisachees 3y ago
I used to contract for a company that did semiconductors and some of the clean room equipment was running ancient stuff on computers that live in a metal box attached to the equipment. I've seen Solaris 2.5.1 x86, I've seen windows 95, some of them run weird flavors of windows server 2003 SP1, and all of them need to be connected to the network but no, you cannot update them because the support contract for the machine says if you break something you're out a mil or two. I would have loved to tell them to go to hell and install sane software but obviously that wasn't my call to make and even so the reason the manufacturer doesn't update the OS is that the guy who wrote the drivers left 15 years ago
- krylon 3y ago
  That kind of story also tickles my nostalgia bone heavily, but I see how up close it's a nightmare. I've seen, less than ten years ago, an industrial plant where the SCADA boxes were running NT 4.0, with plans - plans! - to eventually upgrade to Windows XP, hopefully before the hardware died. Part of the software stack ran on an ancient version of QNX, running several DOS applications on several terminals concurrently. (My guess is that QNX being a RTOS allows it to handle multiple instances of the quasi-realtime DOS application gracefully.) The hardware interface to the SCADA system was a proprietary ISA card that is no longer being built, and of course there is no replacement for PCI or PCIe. The licensing dongle is attached to the parallel port, and the way the software talks to it is so peculiar it has to be a "real" parallel port, a USB-to-parallel adapter does not work (at least not reliably enough to be useful). At least none of these machines were connected to the Internet. If any of that had been my problem, it would have given me nightmares at the very least, and probably driven me mad. But since that wasn't the case, I just enjoyed the nostalgic and quirky setup. Not something I got to see every day, that's for sure.

by krylon 3y ago

themoonisachees 3y ago

I used to contract for a company that did semiconductors and some of the clean room equipment was running ancient stuff on computers that live in a metal box attached to the equipment. I've seen Solaris 2.5.1 x86, I've seen windows 95, some of them run weird flavors of windows server 2003 SP1, and all of them need to be connected to the network but no, you cannot update them because the support contract for the machine says if you break something you're out a mil or two. I would have loved to tell them to go to hell and install sane software but obviously that wasn't my call to make and even so the reason the manufacturer doesn't update the OS is that the guy who wrote the drivers left 15 years ago

krylon 3y ago
That kind of story also tickles my nostalgia bone heavily, but I see how up close it's a nightmare. I've seen, less than ten years ago, an industrial plant where the SCADA boxes were running NT 4.0, with plans - plans! - to eventually upgrade to Windows XP, hopefully before the hardware died. Part of the software stack ran on an ancient version of QNX, running several DOS applications on several terminals concurrently. (My guess is that QNX being a RTOS allows it to handle multiple instances of the quasi-realtime DOS application gracefully.) The hardware interface to the SCADA system was a proprietary ISA card that is no longer being built, and of course there is no replacement for PCI or PCIe. The licensing dongle is attached to the parallel port, and the way the software talks to it is so peculiar it has to be a "real" parallel port, a USB-to-parallel adapter does not work (at least not reliably enough to be useful). At least none of these machines were connected to the Internet. If any of that had been my problem, it would have given me nightmares at the very least, and probably driven me mad. But since that wasn't the case, I just enjoyed the nostalgic and quirky setup. Not something I got to see every day, that's for sure.