Its not the code that's concerning, its the hardware. The idea that they never bothered to virtualize or emulate this in 30 years says a lot about how IT is run

Its not the code that's concerning, its the hardware. The idea that they never bothered to virtualize or emulate this in 30 years says a lot about how IT is run at that school. A single developer could emulate whatever IO goes to that radio and have it controlled by a simple computer with redundancy. I wonder what they're paying the original developer to maintain this turkey. I imagine he's charging enough to where the sunk cost fallacy is obvious here. What I find interesting is all the places where FOSS is lacking. There doesn't seem to be a popular and well managed FOSS climate control system. Is anyone making standardized controllers, thermostats, etc? This stuff should be a commodity by now. I'm guessing its hard to work with all the proprietary HVAC stuff and its also an unsexy problem to solve. I'd love to replace my thermostat with a raspberry pi and have a lot of fun modern features. There's a hackaday article about someone doing this, but its a pretty primitive project.