Ancient industrial machines use ancient windows computers. This has been known forever. There’s a whole niche industry of very expensive ram and hard drives and other components keeping this industry going
Yeah man. Details are going to be fuzzy here, but I think it was only in recent memory where Boeing upgraded the planes in Japan to no longer need floppy disks.
Yes i still use floppy disks regularly for my cnc plasma table
Nuclear silos… is that early dos system I believe?
As long as things are not connected and not trying to add newer stuff , what’s the problem?
I run a computer on Win7 at work, because it needs some important legacy software. It can’t be containered because it has a nasty licence manager.
And my oscilloscope runs on Win98.
I would still be using Windows 7 if it was safe to connect to the internet.
I can’t believe government systems are just open to cyber security like that.
Are there not cyber terrorists for some teenager that has tried to do anything with these unsecured systems?
Just slap some bit defender on it. That’s all that we have to do with windows 10 and we’re all good to go. Hey if Linux can run on the same box for all these years and be safe theres no reason why any windows system can’t be safe with a simple add on.
Windows 11 is just a tmp chip added to board
Srsly that is all. Something smaller than a thumb drive changed and they are trying to convince the world to make more waste. It’s fucking stupid. Microsoft can eat fat ass.
Why would Windows 7 not be “safe” to connect to the internet? Do you understand how any of this works?
Lemmy is overloaded with people that puff up and want to present like they know things about tech, when they know basically nothing.
Get a hardware firewall, get basic safe practices in place, don’t do basic user operations as admin, and configure shit correctly. If you think that your OS is there to protect you, you are a tech foooooooooooooool
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I just connected my Windows 7 machine to the internet and two Russians jumped out my serial port! One is holding me down while the other one is stealing the CPU from my washing machine! Send help!
Well see the problem is you didn’t hot glue the cereal and milk port shut dummie
I hope they aren’t the hackers known as 4chan!
Well one did fuck me in the ass while the other one stole my favorite underwear right out from the delicate cycle. Total animals.
No, and that is saddly the standard these days. Its all just bullshit sales tatics and a weird take on what risks are and are not involved with legacy tech.
Like dude how am I supposed to order burgers through skip the dishes if I don’t have Windows 11 and a 64 core CPU with 256GB of DDR18 super RAM running terabytes of vibe-coded AI slop!???
I’d still be using Windows 7 if I could.
I mean, you can if you want to
It’s not safe and all that stuff.
Why do people keep repeating this tired propaganda? What exactly do you think will happen?
No1 rule in IT security: Keep shit updated.
Now I haven’t used windows other than managed work stuff for a decade but I would assume that the problem with the already existing nightmare of windows would be a lot worse if completely void of bugfixes.
But if you have an insight in to an entire field where the experts disagree on the subject I’m very keen on hearing it.
Very simple: I’m one user.
Do explain. How is that relevant to not getting bugfixes for your OS?
Where did I say not to get bugfixes for my OS, which is Windows 7?
I know it’s not exactly the point of the article but for a lot of things, I reckon a good amount of ‘innovation’ was pretty pointless. I personally don’t think I ever needed anything that Office 2003 can’t do… (Of course I don’t use any MS office to begin with but you get the point)
=Let(), Lambda and Regex were good additions to Excel imo
Whoa I had no idea of those functions. I just checked the documentation and I already know a hundred places I could use those.
Everything beyond the Dewey decimal system is/was pretty unnecessary, imo. We created a way to organize and “quickly” locate information stored in a physical format.
The near complete lack of manual labor has had many long reaching effects on society.
I type this on my brand new flagship phone…
I’ve been trying tk get family to switch to Linux, but some are irrationally attached to MS Word. I wonder if Office 2003 will run in Wine?
I’ve had success with Office 2010 under Wine.
https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iId=18487
I’ve heard LibreOffice has settings that make it look like Word
The elevator was running Windows XP.
Clearly an extreme case of overengineering. A elevator has no business running more than a few microcontrollers.
But how else can it be safe to connect to the internet?
You need to be on-site to fix it anyway, just access the debug port.
But how else can it book requests for priority access, and verify the credit card for whoever booked the elevator?
Ah, the blossoms of unimpeded, wild capitalism.
In highrises with lots of stops and users, it uses some more advanced software to schedule the optimal stops, or distribute the load between multiple lifts. A similar concept exists for HDD controllers, where the read write arm must move to different positions to load data stored on different plates and sectors, and Repositioning the head is a slow and expensive process that cuts down the data transfer rate.
This requires little more than a 286. It’s an elevator. Responding in times measured in seconds. What kind of computations do you think are required here? Imaginary quaternion matrixes? Squared?
Yes, but if you have it as a Windows program it’s easier to configure on a screen with mouse and keyboard, change settings, display help files or give the source code to someone else to make changes or add features.
also it was probably not too expensive to grad a bog standard PC off the shelf and do it on that. I’ve see raspis in the wild doing tasks like that. and those will be outdated by the time they’re replaced too
It’s probably only the screen component that is running an old version of embedded windows.
That’s what I think too. And then I see “Their systems are built into everything around us”, which basically only applies to PCs and laptops. What is built into pretty much everything around us, is GnuLinux.
What is built into pretty much everything around us is GnuLinux.
Many things, but far from that.
Yeah, it was a statement, not a question. But it’s partly my fault for not using the comma appropriately. Fixed.
Not even GNU - just Linux.
Yeah yeah, something something GNU/Linux blah blah copypasta…
Screen? In a elevator?
How else are you gonna show ads?
I hate that you are right.
Yes? That is not that unusual and it is mentioned in the third sentence of the article.
As I rode up to the 14th floor, my eyes were drawn to a screen built into the side of the lift.
Those screens can easily run on an integrated Raspberry Pi microcontroller, they dont exactly have complex graphics
RPi is not a microcontroller.
We are far away from the release of the Raspberry Pi if that screen is running an early version of Windows CE. Putting a PC in the elevator to drive the screen was probably the most cost effective solution.
Was but theres no reason to keep doing that
New ones probably use something newer. The 20 year old elevator in a hospital will only be upgraded if something breaks.
There’s not particularly good reason to stop doing it in that scenario either.
You have an offline technology stack in that elevator that has been doing the job correctly for 20 years. Why take on the expense and risk of changing things that aren’t currently broken?
It would be crazy if you are building new to resort to that stack, but for an established elevator, why bother?
Same for some old oscilloscopes at work. I’m not crazy about the choice but I can hardly suggest it would be practical to change it while the oscilloscopes still do their function.
I would say it’s a problem if the stack is online, but if it is self contained, the age of the software doesn’t make it a problem in and out itself.
Qube cinema servers only got off XP in 2015. They’re still on 7 though.
MS DOS 6.6 for me - I enjoy the power of a 286 processor and much smaller instruction sets.
:O
Luxury. All I had was a 186.
I’m one of the lucky ones with an 8086 that clearly saw the downgrade to 186.
AMD only just recently passed that with their 9000 series CPUs and Intel has only had better ones for a bit longer.
Vic 20 here, I just like a green font
there’s a word for those people: awesome
windows xp was peak; running anything before xp is legendary
Idk, it was horrendously insecure, would freeze a lot, and missing creature comforts like window tiling.
Tbh I think you’re letting nostalgia blind you to XP’s flaws a little.
If they kept refining Win7 it would’ve been great.
Idk, it was horrendously insecure, would freeze a lot, and missing creature comforts like window tiling.
It was significantly more secure than it’s DOS-based predecessor of the time, Windows ME (that’s a whole other rabbit hole; if you wanna talk insecure and buggy as fuck - look no further). That’s what people don’t realize, they look at the past through a modern lens. You gotta look at it from the time it was released. There’s a reason mainstream consumer-focused Windows editions dropped DOS and moved to the NT kernel. XP was the first real consumer version of Windows based on
XPNT.If they kept refining Win7 it would’ve been great.
They did, it was called “Windows 8” and nobody liked it.
I’m not looking at it through a modern lense. It was very insecure at the time, too. I worked in a PC repair shop and at the time that business was a money printer in terms of getting rid of endless malware.
Later versions of windows cleared up the horrendous security to such an extent that the shop was no longer economically viable, and we had to close.
XP was not the first consumer version based on NT, I don’t know why you think that.
Although yes, the DOS versions were even worse. Well, in theory anyway. In practice not, since most people at that time didn’t have PCs that old connected to the internet.
They did, it was called “Windows 8” and nobody liked it.
I would not consider Win8 a “refinement” of Win7 lol, they changed the entire UX, added an app store they tried to force people into, created a new executable format, etc.
Windows 8 is basically the polar opposite of a “refinement” release!
But before ME there was Windows 2000, with its particularly gorgeous spin of the classical design, and other than appearance - being kinda same as XP, but faster.
XP was the first real consuner version of Windows based on XP.
On NT you mean, and no, W2K was a consumer system.
XP was the first real consuner version of Windows based on XP.
On NT you mean
Whoops! Yes, NT.
But before ME there was Windows 2000, with its particularly gorgeous spin of the classical design, and other than appearance - being kinda same as XP, but faster.
[…]
and no, W2K was a consumer system.
W2K was most definitely not built with consumers in mind; the base edition was “Professional” and was meant to be a workstation OS. It was a bit of an oddball in that a not-insignificant amount of power users preferred it at home over 98/Me - but it was a business-oriented system first and foremost. XP added a lot of features over 2000, including more consumer-oriented tools and applications. That’s why I specified XP as “the first real consumer version”.
Personal anecdote: When I was in jr high, the “family PC” was a Toshiba laptop loaded with W2K, and compared to the W98 system we had before, 2000 was certainly not meant for “regular” home users. That’s what Me was supposed to be, but we all know how that went… IMO, I’m almost certain that the downfall of Me, paired with W2K being as good as it was at the time, was part of the driving force for MS to base future consumer versions on the NT kernel.
But this article is talking about people running Windows 7 today, so comparing current actions through a modern lens is entirely valid
Technically, they did, and it was not great.
You consider Win8 a refinement of Win7?
To me refinement means small changes to make something better. It doesn’t mean completely changing the entire UX.
I ran Linux 1994ish. Amiga OS before. Amstrad CPC 464 before. A friend ran Sinclair ZX-80, that was the first system I had access to.
aside from radio shack and texas instruments that i used at camp, i think i was sadly too young to do anything but windows 3.1 :( our first computer was a tandy sensation in the early 90s and i didn’t really play with linux until maybe the mid 2000s
except for playing with apple IIe and radio shack computers through school and camp, that is.
TRS-80 and TI 99/4A presumably?
i’m pretttyyyyy sure this one is the one we had at camp :)
What luxury, it came with floppy drives!
“stuck” more like happy to not have to deal with the last 15-ish years of microsoft ruining everything they previously excelled at.
They lost me when they removed the start button on the left side of the taskbar in version 8.1 (I think it was) to… Be cool with the kids (I think 8.1 was supposed to be touch screen friendly)? I don’t even know, but I went back to Windows 7 for a long while.
The backlash with the start button was so huge that they put it back on the taskbar in Windows 10 (at least mine has it and is the reason I got Windows 10). I’m currently refusing to update to Windows 11, because it apparently crashes when playing certain video games and I’m not about to have the other trash bugs that come with it, which I’ve been seeing posted on Microsoft help forums when I search for Windows 10 related questions. Fuck that noise, I don’t want to deal with it.
They seemingly wanted to design the entire interface around touchscreen 2-in-1s. If you went in a Microsoft store around the time windows 8 came out, they were leaning really hard into the 2-in-1s. I got a surface pro 3 at that time that I used to take handwritten notes in school, and the windows 8 interface was honestly awesome with that use case. On my desktop PC, though, I held out updating from 7 until windows 10.
I have had better luck with game compatibility using proton on linux than I had with win 11
Windows 8 removed the start button, 8.1 brought back most all of the “legacy” UI features (which still persist today).
It might be. I remember buying a laptop at that time and it came with 8 and it annoyed me so dang much.
Never thought I’d miss Ballmer, but here we are.
Yeah. Its a gross feeling isn’t it?
I was tearing out ancient infrastructure for a new office and my eye kept going to a rectangular square box on the wall. Finally realized it was a PC! The cause of death was clear, PSU fan died, killed itself from heat. It was a form factor I had never seen, but standard nonetheless. It was running an answering machine system in DOS, still worked! Such a rare machine I’ve only found a single reference on the web and a single video about it. 1999, 486XS (I know, would kill for a DX, it’s soldered on), upgraded from 2x 2MB SIMMs to a whopping 2x 64MB SIMMs. Imagine what that would have cost in the day!
LONG story, but I got it running Windows 95b. 3.1 was just too much challenge to get it networked and happy. Much pain was removed when I got a USB floppy emulator. Can’t do jack without a floppy! Broke the network card drivers, need to start over. Had it running Doom with a legit SoundBlaster card and could RDP into over the network.
It was an amazing journey getting it all together and updated. Most of that knowledge is gone from the internet, and I sure don’t remember all the tricks. Going to be my first token ring machine! LOL, had to get parts from Romania and trash cans.
Man, remember when people used to break into offices to steal the RAM?
My work experience in around 1995 was spent at a local computer firm.
At one point a group of men in balaclavas showed up, the boss stopped playing Doom long enough to cover the security camera and hand over a bunch of crumpled banknotes, and I was handed this pile of SIMMs to put in a test rig to make sure they were OK to sell.
I also had to straighten the pins on used/stolen 486 CPUs, and pretty sure at one point was taken to break into a warehouse. There was certainly nobody else in the whole building, and we loaded the van with a bunch of cheap looking boxes before taking them back to HQ.
The boss was also banging a girl in my class, which in later years I learned makes him a paedo. Times sure were simpler in 1995.
If you ever see yourself in the need of information about the DOS era again, Vogons is the place to go IMHO.
But it’s all in poetry, unfortunately.
I binge people doing this type of thing on YouTube lol. I miss working in the industry
The cause of death was clear, PSU fan died, killed itself from heat.
PSU: “Release…me…from this mockery called life”
Mail sorter for a company I worked for uses Windows 3.1.
My parents ancient HP from 1997, I sold the motherboard with popped capacitors for $250. I informed the buyer of the condition and he said he didn’t care, he’d fix it, but they needed it for some legacy hardware their company functioned on.
😂 🤣
Similarly, my Dad ran his medical office on Win98 until he died (2011).
Of course, he had no support for OS or the medical office software other than himself (and me).
Had a supplier of inexpensive old machines/parts.
All cause he refused to pay the $5k required to upgrade the medical office software that ran on those machines. 🤷♂️
My dad’s company still runs software from 2002 for recording sales and sending bills. Runs fine on Windows 10 surprisingly
I’m disturbed that an elevator is running a desktop OS. How did this happen? Did they never hear of microcontrollers?
I could tell you the stories of W95 & XP that runs the medical world…
My assumption would be that the display is not related to operating the elevator, but rather displaying information about businesses on the respective floors. I’ve seen those a fair few times, and since they run on isolated networks or even fully local, there’s little risk.
Frighteningly, i worked as an admin at a hospitality wifi business that ran a windows box for dhcp duty. I would have to go o site, in the middle of the night, down to the basement of this hotel, and reboot the damn thing. It would die almost every week. Replaced with a linux server and never heard from them again.
Why not? Still using Windows 7 on one of my ThinkPads. It’s a solid system, if you know what you’re doing and how to use is safely.
and how to use is safely.
Such as by disconnecting the ethernet and power cables
When you get your IT knowledge from the '90s movie Hackers…
I wouldn’t be surprised if there are a bumper crop of level 10 CVEs in the latest and “greatest” version of Windows 7 that will never get patched. Unless you have one of those special enterprise licenses that they keep updating.
No one is attacking your system like that, you are not that big of a deal. And if you are, why would you think the new software would not be as vulnerable? Because the vulnerability is not yet listed? Because the backdoors and tricks are not documented?
This mindset always bugged me, its just madness.
But it sounds cool! Angelina Jolie and Sandra Bullock are waiting for me in my apartment to hack the web!
At my old workplace, there was numerous XP machines still going. They were running old machine equipment, and basically served as a controller for the entire machine.
As it turns out, it was cheaper to keep these XP stations, instead of buying a completely new Hydrolic press, or whatever it was running, which cost several hundred of thousands of dollars.
One day one of these computers stopped working, and we immediately tried to get the software to work on a brand new W10 replacement. Took us a week of drivers hell, until we eventually went to the basement, found an exact replica, and swapped the HDD over.
The company, making these heavy machineries, went bankrupt in the early 2000s, and there was literally no way of getting the software to run on anything besides that original box.
At one of my old works we had a SMT machine allegedly built in 2012 which was running on XP. Worked flawlessly 🤷
I’d like a law that software / hardware companies who file for bankruptcies must release the source / files for their tech to an open source repository.
If you are a big company there are often ESCROW agreements for things like this. I have encountered the “data dumps” from time to time and whilst it’s “better” it’s not ideal. Half finished documentarian, virtual machines of mis-configured OS installs… it’s almost as if it was just a straight copy of the development environment as it was just as they made the final version of the software…
But it’s better than nothing.
Main issue I can see with this forcing open source would be libraries and frameworks licensed from others who would likely still be in business and wouldn’t agree to those parts becoming open sourced. See also WinAMP https://www.theregister.com/2024/10/16/opensourcing_of_winamp_goes_badly/
I like that idea bit it’ll never fly. That software is an asset. A bankrupt company needs every asset to be sold to cover as much percentage of their debt to their vendors as possible. I’ve been in a company that went bankrupt and I’ve been the vendor of a company that went bankrupt. Being the vendor was the harder experience.
I’m sure it makes the bean counters happier to have another asset valued at X amount, but in practice the software will just be locked in some vault where it won’t do anyone any good.
Its an instance where the number on the screen doesn’t actually correspond to any useful economic activity.
To bad
That idea often comes up in these discussions and I’ve never really had an argument against. Best I got is that parts of that software may have moved to more modern stuff that was purchased by another company. But that’s a damned thin excuse not to implement this.
Yup. Take backups, have spares, and keep it off the Internet and it’ll work just fine.
Pro tip, you can get IDE to CF adapters if you want to put an SSD in those old machines to really see them fly. Just be aware that they don’t have nearly as good write durability as a real SSD, so keep write heavy operations on the HDD.
You can get industrial grade CF cards that use SLC memory. They have much better write endurance than normal CF cards.
There’s still things like that on my workplace today. I think there’s some older, rarely used CNC with Win98 on the controller. We just keep spares around when they break, but that’s cheaper than replacing the whole machinery. Also there’s some XP stations running software for an industrial machine which would cost quarter of a million to replace. Some of those need access to network drives and such but they live in a strictly isolated VLAN.
And, as far as I’ve told at least, there was no option at any point to upgrade just the computers on those things. It’s always the whole assembly line or whatever they’re connected to. There’s not many companies willing to throw hundreds of thousands every 3-5 years to replace perfectly working equipment.
It’s funny, because this scenario actually happened in our CNC hall.
The guys over there were working with SolidWorks and Mastercam. I never really got too involved with their work, other than installing the software remotely for them.
It could very well have been a CNC machine that this procedure was about. I just know that they had all kinds of equipment in there, along with a hydrolic press, which peaked my interest the most because of a certain Finnish youtuber haha.
there’s some older, rarely used CNC
Me over here with a dirty mind 100% positive that I’m not using “CNC” the same way you are. I don’t know what your way means, but my way is more fun.
CNC—computer numerical control, where a computer makes the cutty/smushy/printy parts move through meatspace.
CNC—computer numerical control, where a computer makes the cutty/smushy/printy parts move through meatspace.
I set up a 32 bit Windows 7 VM so my dad could keep using his old drawing program that was built for Windows 3.11.
It was the last version of Windows to support 3.11 compabillity.
Works well.
Just a note: Windows software for controlling hardware is highly likely to assume a)direct access to the hardware (sometimes mediated thorough ancient APIs and assuming the existence of defunct expansion slots) and b) assume meatspace time can be counted using OS timing ticks (which get stretched out as modern VMs timeshare with other processes underneath the virtulized hardware). It is awfully tough to replace them sometimes.
Yeah, I suspect you gotta do something similar to what McLaren did when the special mid 90s computer they used for the F1 got too hard to replace as they broke, they built a new computer interface that was compatible with modern computers and allowed them to interface with the car
lol what drawing program?
Macrografx Designer 3.1:
There are third parties that create new software for old industrial machines for this exact reason.
Yeah, and as long as these things never touch the internet, there really isn’t an issue.
