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 wher

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.