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I seriously thought this was a The Onion article based on the title. Gotta love incredibly dangerous things running on antiquated hardware.

• davidw 17y ago
  Antiquated == "Well Tested" in many cases. They don't run stuff like the space shuttle on the very latest AMD chips, for instance.
  • TrevorJ 17y ago
    In fact, the Hubble ran on 486 chips at late as last year. Not sure if this last mission upgraded the hardware or not. I believe that the reasoning behind it was that that chipset was more resistant to failure induced by radiation than new hardware, or at least the effects and failure modes where more understood with the older chip. Much less of an x factor.
  • selven 17y ago
    Indeed. A few fighter jets still run on vacuum tubes, I believe.
    • davidw 17y ago
      That's nothing - there are a few Chinese jets left that have a little guy with an abacus crouched in the nose. [ Sorry, couldn't resist, I liked the mental image too much. ]
      • zandorg 17y ago
        There's an Asimov story about that too.