[ale] [EXTERNAL] Re: Stupid people and DST

[Steve Litt]

Allen Beddingfield via Ale said on Fri, 18 Mar 2022 01:40:18 +0000

>The same places who still have Windows NT, OS/2, DOS, SCO Unix, etc...
>in place.  The places with a single-task computer running some piece
>of equipment or machinery, where the computer is treated just like an
>appliance or piece of machinery. I've seen (within the past few
>years), early 80s vintage IBM computers with two vertical 8" diskette
>drives running scientific equipment, 386 systems running scientific
>equipment, an 8088 based system with a proprietary interface of some
>sort controlling a door lock system, an OS/2 Warp 3 system running a
>kiosk presentation that has been in place since the early 90s, an
>Amiga 2000 being actively used for one task, a Windows 95 system
>running a fabric cutter, etc....  I occasionally do some consulting
>work for a government office with an in-production 1980s era COBOL
>application running on SCO OpenServer 5 - this thing is in active
>daily use, and prints to a bunch of wide format dot matrix printers.
>I pulled it into a VMware VM for them several years ago, to get off of
>an old 1990s Pentium system it was running on.  I personally have a
>Windows XP system sitting around, solely because that is the newest
>version of Windows that the software for one of my radios will run on
>(ham radio o
> perator here).  I know of other hams with old DOS systems for that
> same purpose.

Well, those people have 13 years to find an alternative. I recently
converted one of my 1985 Turbo Pascal 3.0 programs to FreePascal on
Linux. If they were using Clipper, Foxpro, DBASE, etc, there's the
modern Harbour Project to convert to a modern Linux executable,
although obviously a few source code tweaks will need to be made.

I'm pretty sure a few source code tweaks are all that stand between an
SCO Openserver 5 Cobol program and a brand new GNUCobol program. 13
years.


>Not everyone upgrades things that just work....  

I agree, almost completely. Upgraders following fashion trends deserve
what they get. But stuff breaks, and replacement parts become
unavailable, and eventually things that just work (until they don't)
become impractical.

SteveT

Steve Litt 
March 2022 featured book: Making Mental Models: Advanced Edition
http://www.troubleshooters.com/mmm