take a look at manufacturing equipment. A very large company I was at last year
had a machine shop available to employees, the most modern way of getting the
CNC data into it was with a floppy
David Lang
On Mon, 23 Mar 2015, Kent C. Brodie wrote:
we have tons... TONS of pieces of lab gear controlled by DOS pc's... and
there's dot matrix printers in many of the lab hallways, still in use.
part of my workplace feels like a wing of the smithsonian....
On Mar 23, 2015 5:35 PM, rac...@anl.gov wrote:
Tom Perrine made the following keystrokes:
> The oldest protocol we're running anywhere is IPv4.
> (It had to be said! :-) )
Oh if only that were true...
If you take a look at various "official" reports, you'll see that there
are plenty of things that are still using old Teletype codex.
Ever see the actual weather alerts coming out of the National Weather Service?
Limited charater set, line width, formatting, ... One could claim this is
policy not protocol, but when you have limits you need to hold onto because
someone may not be able to accept anythings newer than the 1950's...
When you get into some other .gov spaces you'll see even more limitations
on how data is sent around. IT IS NOT SHOUTING WHEN THE ONLY CHARACTERS
YOU CAN USE ARE THOSE FROM AN ASR-33.
Ascii also existed before IPv4. It may not be a protocol, but it's a
convention we are all using, or compatible with. Not everything has
moved to utf-8.
How many people fire up a "terminal" that is 80x24 or 80x43? Ever wonder
where that stuff comes from? Why not use something different today? We
are no longer tied to ADM-3a terminals and IBM-periscopes.
There are also still devices around that still use dialup modems. Some of
those do operate in protocols and speeds that pre-date the internet.
Where you are really going to get some interesting results on ancient stuff
when in the medical and control systems.
About 3 years ago a brand new $500,000 electron microscope was delivered.
It's embedded controller from the vendor was running Windows-98. It
wasn't going to be updated because it worked. They had hardware that
would need to be redesigned to use the interfaces that are no longer
supported under XP or W7 or anything else for that matter. They have
a tcp-ip stack on it, so they can get data in/out and that's all that
really matters. Granted the machine came in infected with some long
dead malware, but that's another story. This system is well protected
by putting it behind more modern systems but it does exist.
Hospitals have lots of machines that run this way.
Building control systems as well.
Just because a building is all shiney and new does not mean the systems
they installed on them are "state of the art" as far as we, (the leading edge)
are concerned. They are as current as they need to be do get the job
done AND be compatible with as many ancient pieces of cruft they may run
into at the facility. It's a real pain if you don't support the 1975 version
of some sensor that is embedded throughout the temperature control system
in the building.
--Gene
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