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It may do the job, but if recruiting people to maintain a legacy system is damn near impossible, it is no longer appropriate for the job and should be replaced.
by kintamanimatt 13y ago
It may do the job, but if recruiting people to maintain a legacy system is damn near impossible, it is no longer appropriate for the job and should be replaced.
- kryten 13y agoUnless there is a tradeoff. The tradeoff here being that introducing immature equipment may result in a higher risk. Plus if it's an older PDP11, it's fully documented both hardware and software wise and is built out of flip chip modules which are essentially still replaceable and repairable to this day with a soldering iron and any half-decent EE. You can't even get half the parts in your PC from 5 years ago and there is no documentation bar some NDA smothered PDF which is mostly incorrect for most of the bits. It's the same reason I still have a 1972 oscilloscope...
- vidarh 13y agoIt just means the cost is a bit higher: You need to train people yourself. That didn't use to be such a novel idea.
- willvarfar 13y agoSurely its several orders of magnitude cheaper to hire someone, and them learn the system, than it is to pay for a rewrite?
- mseebach 13y agoOh yes. http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html Also, if you think of PDP-11 programmers as embedded/hardware developers rather than "modern" "soft" developers, the challenge of finding developers becomes more approachable.