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Who said anything about "serious"? (FWIW: I suspect there are more than a few old industrial control systems and such out there that are still running DOS, jus
by wk_end 6mo ago
Who said anything about "serious"?
(FWIW: I suspect there are more than a few old industrial control systems and such out there that are still running DOS, just because of an "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" attitude)
- kjs3 6mo agoMy brother is in manufacturing. DOS is everywhere. Older things too (PDP-11? DG Nova? Seen both, semi-recently). Not just because "ain't broke, don't fix", but because when you have a cloth dying machine or brick forming machine you spent >US$5M for, that is often a bespoke install for your plant, you don't replace it because some guy who prolly slings Javascript all day sez "DOS is oooold, boomer".
- ale42 6mo agoGiven the implications, I guess nobody is going to touch those setups to put an SDL-based program on them, though...
- kjs3 6mo agoYeah...this is "if you screw around with it enough, you void the warranty and we will no longer support it" for a potentially multimillion dollar machine.
- zozbot234 6mo agoThese DOS machines for industrial control could probably be replaced by an Arduino or a far more reliable MCU, whereas running an actual legacy PC as a business-critical component in manufacturing has to be a bit of a nightmare by now. AI could probably do a good enough job of working out how the legacy DOS executables were intended to work.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- kjs3 6mo agoThis isn't hackaday or adafruit. Everything is easy when you don't have to actually do it. You are wrong on every point.
- zozbot234 6mo agoYou might notice that I never once claimed that the replacement I described would be "easy" or, for that matter, even advisable given the broader real-world constraints involved; just technically feasible in the barest sense. I don't think many people would want to use DOS to design a greenfield system of that kind today, and there's a reason for that. Yes, you can buy newly made "DOS PCs" today, but can you really ensure that today's brand new DOS PC will behave in every way that matters like the actual 30 years old DOS PC that used to control the machinery? That's not a trivial question to answer. If you design the system from the outset to work with an actual PLC/SCADA or similar (the typical solution for hooking up to big industrial machinery of that sort) that's a bit less likely to come up as an issue, and the hardware will actually be designed for that kind of environment.
- kjs3 6mo agoYes, if you ignore everything that was discussed, invent time travel do you can "design the system from the outset" as the prescient you are, and pretend anyone was talking about greenfield, you get to be right. Good for you...some people just need the 'win'.