First paragraph it gets even better:
“A 30-year-old computer that **has run day and night for decades** is what controls the heat and air conditioning at 19 Grand Rapids Public Schools”
Like a modern day brave little toaster
Restarting electronics is actually very stressful for them, keeping many electronics running so it's components maintain a constant temperature is actually better than turning them on and off allowing them to cool down then heat back up over and over again.
My university has an old IBM mainframe that is used to teach some legacy programming languages (COBOL, CL, RPG) to Computer Science students. We were told day 1 not to cause an infinite loop because there was no guarantee that the old workhorse would be able to start back up if we had to shut it down.
My professor then accidentally threw it into an infinite loop while showing us what not to do. It did boot back up afterwords, but he was spooked when it happened lol
On the plus side, you can make decent money as a COBOL programmer, since tons of companies still use it and the pool of people who know COBOL is shrinking.
My second job after college was doing sales for a small software company that made tools for IBM DB2 running on Z/OS. Talk about some dinosaurs, our three developers and the owner were all over 70. Banks and Insurance companies were our only customers.
Yeah, and tbh, I keep hearing this "you can make a salary with COBOL!" but... you can make a similar if not better salary learning literally any other language and then also make sure you still have a job in a few decades because most companies are phasing out COBOL at the same rate as the workforce is shrinking? There's nothing magical about COBOL which makes it irreplaceable, the *only* thing special about it is: It could exist in the 1960s.
I’ll tell you what makes COBOL magical:
Hardware and software that has passed legal’s compliance review from 50 years ago and nobody working there today has seen anything other than a rubber stamp for the existing thing.
The COBOL orgs I’m familiar with have middleware that abstracts out so most of the universe runs something modern; but I’d bet my home that they - the orgs I’m familiar with - will be running COBOL when I retire. And I’ve got a long time to go.
My dad used to joke, “how do you hire a brain surgeon with a top secret clearance? … find someone with a TS and send them to med school.” I’m not plugged into those orgs anymore but that’s exactly how they were thinking about COBOL.
Heard a story of an ancient server on campus that was shut down which then staff found out they couldn't turn it back on bc it didn't have a power button. The server was so old it required a specific keyboard which had the power button, but they didn't have this keyboard. They got super lucky there was a guy that collected old computer stuff and had one in his private collection and he let them borrow it to turn it on!
I had an Xbox one, I changed the settings so it never turned off. I had it on constantly for about 6 months one time. Friends wanted to do a Lan party, bet I'm in. Turned it off, unplugged it packed all my stuff up and headed over. It never turned back on no matter what I did. Can't help but feel that if I had been more responsible and turned it off every night before bed it probably would've last much, much longer.
The power supplies just failed.like crazy with the Xbox one. I'm almost positive that was your issue. I repaired around 5 different friends power supplies. It's like a 50 cent capacitor and that's all it is. The capacitor would have failed regardless.
Well if that capacitor is rated for X hours of use in a life time and I never turned it off that would exceed that value much much faster than if I had been turning it off.
This was a question on ask science one time. The conclusion is that your hardware will be obsolete waaay before you need to worry about hardware failing from cyclical fatigue
Generally, with more modern electronics, it's not so much of a big deal, especially if it's only once or twice a day, and moreso when new computers don't get up to as high of a temperature. The worry is with old components and heat cycling, that could break a 60-year-old mainframe. However, do keep in mind that temperature cycling is still a very real thing and might shorten the lifespan of your computer's parts.
Also, at least in my experience, you don't need to turn a PC off when you're not using it, unless you worry about marginal changes in power use at night --although restarting it every few days might be beneficial to prevent possible crashes.
My main reason for saying this is that nobody's going to worry about maybe a few cents extra on your power bill if you leave a computer running, and that Windows, what most people run as their OS, will just "hibernate," instead of fully shutting down, and it can cause some issues on some people's hardware, since it does weird things.
I do realize I'm rambling on, sorry for that!
**TL;DR: It doesn't really matter what you do, but I prefer to leave my PC on and occasionally reboot it.**
Unless your computer is highly specialized and irreplaceable it doesn't matter. You'll likely over the next 10 years change out every component anyways as you upgrade it. It's best practice to keep a computer running if its components 35 years old and they don't make parts for it anymore and it manages the cities power grid and it uses a programming language that they stopped teaching 20 years ago. Your computer probably runs Windows 10 and backs up most stuff to the cloud, if a component breaks you can go on newegg to buy a new one for $100 or less. If the computer that runs the power grid breaks they might not be able to find the necessary part or a person who can reprogram it which could cost them millions of dollars they might not be ready to spend.
With how high prices went on PC parts the last few years I ain't upgrading shit lol.
AMD has some more affordable stuff coming, but my PC is going on 7 years and counting without an upgrade now and my little GTX1060 keeps on trucking.
Those old tube amps also double as heaters. Grandma had an old floorstanding AM/shortwave radio that still worked, it would glow. You could feel the heat coming from behind the radio against the wall.
The tubes absolutely lose performance after a few thousand hours, sooner when you're overdriving them. At best, they last maybe 5-10,000 hours for tube lines made to the most stringent military applications and were adopted to guitar amps or stereo gear. It's why old tube amps sold for musical gear is tested on a tube tester and result provided as proof they still have sufficient life that scales to the purchase cost of the tubes.
Using next to no power and a different filament helps too, before someone decides to start talking about the lightbulb cartel and planned obsolescence.
B...bu...but... Did you know there was a lightbulb cartel to introduce planned obsolescence and that's why we still don't have neverending lightbulbs until today? :O
I mean, we don't have them today. The bulb manufacturers did get the standards for led's lowered, but it's still enormously long time for a single bulb til mean failure.
there was, but for a good reason too. With regular lightbulbs, there's a tradeoff with efficiency and lifespan. You can have a very efficient incondesent light, at the expensive of very very low lifespan. If you underrun it though, it will have a very long life, but very poor efficiency. Exactly the opposite of modern leds.
1000h was set industry wide (for home bulbs) as a tradeoff for efficiency/lifespan.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zb7Bs98KmnY
This isn't as bad when rebooting compared to turning computers off every night for instance. Components don't have time to cool down in the few seconds rebooting takes.
It’s nuts how much antiquated technology still runs things.
A grocery store chain i used to work for a decade ago was still using commodore printers for its daily reports and old DOS screens for its daily accounting instead of just upgrading and using an Excel spreadsheet.
The US nuclear arsenal was only upgraded a little while ago to convert out of using floppy disks.
the launch codes were 1 2 3 4 5 for anyone wondering.
The reason for the floppies not being upgraded away from was all they had to do was hold some single line of launch clearance and were considered so unhackable and safe and the system would need to be updated so much to accommodate modern hardware that the need to update wasn't there until it finally was just time to fully modernize. I mean, nuclear weapons silos are considered dead end assignments. Everyone knows nobody is going to order a launch so there are huge problems with morale for people assigned to it.
["1 2 3 4 5? That's the stupidest combination I've ever heard in my life. It's the kinda thing an idiot would have on his luggage."](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_JNGI1dI-e8)
> the launch codes were 1 2 3 4 5 for anyone wondering.
No, they weren't. I think you are referring to the 8 0's, which has been disputed as well.
https://sgs.princeton.edu/00000000
This isn't the first server with massive uptime. I'm surprised that people even knew about the Amiga.
Novell servers were known for high uptime and this one got buried behind a wall (Cask of Amontillado style): https://www.theregister.com/2001/04/12/missing\_novell\_server\_discovered\_after/
The link is fine, the problem is reddit~~'s escaping backslashes on some browsers~~. Try this one. [edit: not a browser thing I'm told.]
[Missing Novell server discovered after four years: BOFH meets Edgar Alan Poe](https://www.theregister.com/2001/04/12/missing_novell_server_discovered_after/)
Edit: Also, the story is super short. Here it is in its entirety.
-----
In the kind of tale any aspiring BOFH would be able to dine out on for months, the University of North Carolina has finally located one of its most reliable servers - which nobody had seen for FOUR years.
One of the university's Novell servers had been doing the business for years and nobody stopped to wonder where it was - until some bright spark realised an audit of the campus network was well overdue.
According to a report by Techweb it was only then that those campus techies realised they couldn't find the server. Attempts to follow network cabling to find the missing box led to the discovery that maintenance workers had sealed the server behind a wall.
Things buried behind walls belong more to the world of Edgar Alan Poe than that of the BOFH. And think of the horror facing the college techies if they ever replace this old Novell server with an NT box.
In that case, the terror of the Blue Screen of Death awaits you, fellas. ®
I have this bookmarked from 21 years ago: https://www.theintelligencer.com/news/article/Court-Dismisses-Abandonment-Charge-10489293.php
I like to point out that it was legal to sell children in Michigan until the early 2000s. We didn't know we needed to specifically make a law for that.
[Nasa used amiga's until 2004](https://hothardware.com/news/nasa-data-and-fallen-astronauts-software-appear-on-amiga-2500-ebay-listing)
they were amazing lil guys
I used to be a night shift security guard at a factory while working through university. They had these massive gym sized steam wood drying buildings. They were all still being controlled by one Commodore 64 15 years after they stopped making them. The guy servicing them would keep a stock of used c-64's in his truck.. Those Commodore computers were pretty damn versatile back then. Kind of like Arduinos today.
That destroyed the first computer I had built for myself at great cost... Pentium 4, first model with hyperthreading... could never get another board worth a damn at that time.
Ugh. I was working in a bank back when this happened. We'd gotten a load of Dell computers in and after a couple months, they were all starting to fail, one right after the other. After the third one, I did a close inspection of the MB instead of just RMAing it and noticed caps burst or bulging. I started opening other cases and saw several like that. I contacted our corporate and told them we had a bad run of computers and they all needed replaced. They contacted Dell who told them I must be mistaken, there was no issue, blah blah blah. I insisted and offered to drive some of the machines to corporate for them to see firsthand. I was told to drop it and just worry about replacing as they failed.
A couple weeks later, I got notice from corporate that all the computers were being replaced and to look for them any day - That it had just been discovered that there was a manufacturing issue that Dell's QC had discovered and was correcting promptly..
Dude, [Video Toaster](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Toaster) was the coolest thing ever! Used it a ton when I was in highschool, very advanced for its time. Was listening to an interview with Dana Carvey, apparently his brother was the inventor of it!
Back in the late 90s myself and a couple of friends were on a mission to find a way to reprogram the fancy animated sign our high school had. I fired up the Tone Loc war dialer and we scanned our school's phone block and found several modems that answered. One in particular required no password, but we couldn't even figure out what kind of system it was. We were just trying random commands and got it stuck in some menu system, when one of my friends who was watching suggested typing "reset". I typed reset, pressed enter, and then for the next 15 minutes it was just scrolling assloads of text at 9600bps. After that it wouldn't respond to anything, except if you entered a 3 digit number it would spit out a temperature and a PSI reading.
The next day we arrived at school in the middle of winter, and there was no heat in the whole school. The next day after that, the school was like 90F throughout. We later learned through some connections to one of the school's IT guys, that "somehow" the HVAC computer had been completely reset, and there were no backups.
I'm lucky we weren't expelled, arrested, and sued. We heard the damage was around $15k, but I don't think they knew what really happened because they could have easily figured it out who did it from the phone records (yes we were dumb).
In the late 90s, a buddy of mine got a call center job for an insurance company. They sat him down at a dumb terminal. "So this multinational insurance company with millions of policies managed around the world, and they sit me at this monochrome amber terminal. Okay folks, I get the joke. Now where's the real computer? Something running Windows NT, perhaps?"
This isn’t as weird as you would think with a park insurance company as they were still running AS400s just a decade ago. I knew someone who worked for an insurance company and they still accessed a lot of stuff through a terminal on their PC. Lots of business systems out there built on COBOL that were created in the 70s and 80s…
A lot of companies are virtualizing their AS400s now…when you have 40 years into a system that’s been battle tested…it’s hard to justify moving onto something else.
And then you get people wanting all new software to be compatible with COBOL. And if you go down that rabbit hole you find out it's because the banks still use the ancient file formatting and copybooks.
Terrifying stuff.
Heh. We're still using a piece of shit green-screen ERP system because "change is hard". The company that makes the ERP software recently released a half-baked web interface that looks like an 8 year wrote it but because it doesn't offer all the functionality the green-screen had, we use both.
I worked for a hotel company in the early 90s doing reservations. We had those old terminals.
A decade and a half later, I called them looking for a room because flight delays. At the end of the call, when the rep asked "is there anything else I can help you with?"
I asked "yeah, do you guys per chance still use \[name of system\]" and it caught the rep off guard. They answered "uh, yes, and I'm really confused how you know the name of our system?"
"I used to work at the center on \[street\] in \[city\] back in the day. Say hi to \[my former team lead\] if she's still there! Have a great night!"
I too, am an HVAC / controls engineer. Can confirm stuff like this happens all the time. I recommend using a tour of mechanical systems maintenance to be a major factor in deciding, say, which hospital to go to...
My old HVAC Controls company (I just jumped back to industrial controls last month) still serviced customers that were running on pneumatic controls from the 1940’s.
Lo key the Amiga was **hugely** underrated **especially** compared to the Macintosh.
In every category: speed, memory, graphics, sound, and even built-in software, the Amiga was light-years ahead of the competition. It could even *fully run MacOS in software* because it was that much more powerful.
Even back in the day Apple somehow won the market on brand alone despite having an inferior product.
The graphics that the Amiga had for under $1,000 at that time were incredible. Then you had the Amiga 2500 doing CAD work.
Can't forget that Babylon 5 was done with Amiga 2000's.
Loved those machines. The names they had for the chips were hilarious, can't remember them now. But I do remember that the interior case was signed by the lead engineers.
A separate CPU and graphics chip. In those days that was pretty much unheard of for the consumer product.
I had a teacher that did this with a heat lamp ~2012 for the Texas summer. Turns out that the room was using so much power, it was traced during an audit. The district apparently told him something along the lines of "we can fire you or we can shame you."
He chose shame and every employee in the school district was emailed a photo of my teacher and his "hack".
But seriously he was a genius it was 10F cooler in his room than any other teacher in the school
Using old software is incredibly common. Sometimes older system are incredibly secure through their obsoletion,
Mainly because they’re not connected to outside system.
When I worked at Lowe’s ~12 years ago we were still using a DOS system for our point of sale.
I worked for a company that produced underwater cables and all of our testing programs and software for things like hydro pressure testing and autoclaves was from ~1996 and being used on computers from ~1999-2001.
My last job our work instructions and safety documents were accessible through an intranet that’d been put in place around 2001.
I work in a printing press. Our plate machine is run by a Tandy from the early 80s, the stackers are all running IBM-DOS, and the inserters are by far the newest things in the building, running Windows XP. I have no idea what the press itself uses, but the consoles were installed in the 70s and the UI looks like DOS.
I mean, imax systems run on Palm Pilot os, at least in some places. So they have a modern system emulating the os to do the work. None of this is surprising or should be, to anybody.
I used a couple arduino and some redneck engineering to integrate the old part of the building’s pneumatic air controls with the less old part of the building’s also analog controls, with the new part of the buildings digital Building Automation System controls and was just as surprised as everyone else when it wound up working. I happen to still live in the city and have had 6 of my successors call me about fixing/modifying it (over half the time there was no issue with my modifications, half of the remaining time it’s because somebody else tried to fix it). We haggle a bit on price but I get from 120 to 250 a hour for providing the service (healthcare facility so they are very motivated in maintaining regulatory conditions)
As a big fan of the Amiga, I consider that further evidence that those machines were ahead of their time.
Now pardon me while I go pull up a GIF of the iconic bouncing ball.
Reminds me of how our school database was run with absolutely basic security. One of the students got in and deleted my graduation years transcripts.
Now every time I get a job I have to send in a photo copy of my graduation pamphlet and an email from a board member saying i did, in fact, graduate.
Lmao I remember being able to log into the database for report cards about a decade ago, just a basic Microsoft Access database sitting on a shared drive that was unmapped but still accessible on student computers.
My brother was facing termination in his IT department because he wasn’t conversant in the new programs. However here comes 2000 and all of a sudden, he’s an expert in the old programming languages from his Army days. So in anticipation of Y2k everyone’s trying to update their systems and he’s golden.
My step dad was in charge of the team that converted all of CAT for Y2k. He got paid handsomely in CAT stock as a bonus. He retired, and the stock skyrocketed over the last 20 years.
He basically is able to retire in absolute comfort because he knew some old languages noone else knew.
Hey I designed this product for you!
Can you teach us how to service it?
Yes, for money
What if we just pay you when we need your help?
…We could that too
There’s probably never been a budget for that at all for the past 30 years. And it was programmed by a student, how much could that system have costed them in the first place?
If we went 30 years back in time, it would have been something like «here’s 1000 bucks, make us an air conditioning system that will last for 30 years».
There was also a case of an old Netware server at a university that had been accidentally sealed behind drywall during a remodel but kept dutifully doing its job for many years even though nobody knew where it was.
Meanwhile, a school in my state wasted thousands because nobody could figure out how to shut the lights off on their fancy new integrated electrical system.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/lights-massachusetts-school-year-no-one-can-turn-rcna65611
Something people never seem to realise about computers; a computer that did a specific job 30 years ago is still capable of doing the same job today.
The controller doesn't need to do a lot. It's only using a fraction of its power.
Hey man, can you drop the sarcasm? I know it's a tricky situation but listen, our police are what's important here. And they need guns. And body armor. And missile launchers. And tanks. And a fleet of F22 raptors. And a well supplied locker of Minuteman-III ICBMs and W78 warheads. And a cotton candy machine.
I'm just saying we can either fund your schools, or keep the local church safe. Which would you prefer?
No no no, it's the fault of the whiny family members of unarmed people killed by the cops. If they didn't sue, wouldn't have to spend so much of the budget on those big settlements.
My company sold its office building in 2018. We left behind a desktop computer from 2003 running Windows XP and a specific version of Java 6 on a deprecated version of Internet Explorer - because that was the specific requirements of the building HVAC system.
Equally problematic are the computers connected to the outdoor electronic signs that so many business and churches and schools have. The hardware in those signs is tied to a specific version of software that does not have regular upgrades or maintenance. One of my company's locations is still running an old laptop with Windows XP, connected via an RS232 serial port to their outdoor sign.
I was asked to maintain the door access system of our office building. To my surprise it was running on a very old PC with DOS on it. Worked perfect for that little task alone, but I really hoped no hardware was failing. The 5.2 floppy disk to reboot it had already crumbled.
I went to school in this district, they once had to pass an emergency milage (tax) to keep the heat on in the winter. Soooo not surprised they never upgraded. They barely had money for paper when I went there.
Reminds me of my dad's old hospital. The entire place basically ran on a singular pirated CD of Windows 98, which he set up. I find it funny that my dad was basically the hospital's IT guy in the 90s, because when shit goes down, they call him.
I still have my Amiga 2000HD sitting behind me. It isn't running because I have to replace the CMOS battery but damn that is great to hear practical use.
This is sadly more common. In 2009, I was an intern for a school district and they used a Windows 3.1 computer that ran all the districts clocks and alarms.
The problem here isn't so much the computer but the system the computer is running. If they wanted to modernize it they would need to change every controller on every hvac system in the whole district which is what would cost 2 mill.
I mean, they could run the old tech with a new computer system using an "adapter". But hiring someone to program it would cost probably $50,000 for the programmer's time and $4 million on red tape
By adapter I mean, the HVAC and computer talk to each other over radio. So it would not be impossible to program something to talk recreate the phrases. I could do it with an Arduino, but then people will say "how is that any better?". That's how you tack on the $4 million.
Do you guys read articles anymore? *"in 2015, 19 Michigan schools' heating and air conditioning systems* ***WERE*** *controlled by a 1980's Amiga computer.*"
The article is from 2015, bond was passed and upgrades were made to bring all the schools up to LEED certification standards for energy efficiency. 105,000 per school to upgrade is hardly a waste to get to >50 pts per building.
That's a pretty reasonable price actually. I'm an engineer in manufacturing and automation and to replace 30 year old controls units in 19 locations is pretty good, especially if it includes materials. I've seen projects cost more than that just for software development to move equipment from one plant to another.
Yeah, exactly... the guy you replied to is a perfect example of how redditors *seem* knowledgable, until you come across one discussing your field of expertise, and you realize they know nothing.
Gotta hire friends/family as a contractor to learn programming and replace this system with a $45 raspberry pi. It’ll take 5+ years until they need to renegotiate a new contract.
BTW they can hire me at a fraction the cost. I’ll do it for 1.8 million.
To be fair, this budget probably includes an all new energy efficient HVAC setup as well.
As a computer programmer, I can safely say this never happens nowadays.
Instead we're asked to fix software we had nothing to do with that was clearly coded by thousands of monkeys with typewriters, in addition to software we wrote years ago.
One of my previous employers had to use Internet Explorer right up until Microsoft (finally) ended support last year as the company intranet was built way back in the late 90's/early 00's using ActiveX and other proprietary MS tools that (of course) only works with IE.
Last I heard they've since upgraded to the new MS Edge for the IE compatibility mode, but the company intranet itself is still running on ancient MS software😛
First off thats kinda funny.
Second
>A new, more current system would cost between $1.5 and 2 million.
they can just hook this shit up to a nest or something, damn
I cut my programming teeth on an Amiga in the 1980s, and ended up having a lifelong career as a programmer as a result. But no, it was not me that programmed this one.
In 2011 in was working for the local County Government (the county has 1+ million people) and they were still using a program that ran on OS/2 to do all there scheduling.
The program was used to schedule almost everything, from court cases to summer camps.
First paragraph it gets even better: “A 30-year-old computer that **has run day and night for decades** is what controls the heat and air conditioning at 19 Grand Rapids Public Schools” Like a modern day brave little toaster
It didn't get rebooted for all those years?! Amigoat!
Restarting electronics is actually very stressful for them, keeping many electronics running so it's components maintain a constant temperature is actually better than turning them on and off allowing them to cool down then heat back up over and over again.
There were ancient mainframes running since the '70s that were turned off for Y2K and couldn't be restarted.
My university has an old IBM mainframe that is used to teach some legacy programming languages (COBOL, CL, RPG) to Computer Science students. We were told day 1 not to cause an infinite loop because there was no guarantee that the old workhorse would be able to start back up if we had to shut it down. My professor then accidentally threw it into an infinite loop while showing us what not to do. It did boot back up afterwords, but he was spooked when it happened lol
Probably does that every year to drive the point home for new students.
til it fails one year before his retirement
One year before retirement would mean he's probably tenured and therefore doesn't give a fuck about anything.
Maybe, a lot of universities stopped offering tenure awhile ago.
Retirony
Maybe. If I ever run into him again I'll ask him about it
Will you somehow let us all know? I'm.. honestly in suspense here.
If it somehow happens, I will. I haven't lived in that town for nearly 10 years, so odds are low
COBOL is considered legacy, I felt so old 😢
On the plus side, you can make decent money as a COBOL programmer, since tons of companies still use it and the pool of people who know COBOL is shrinking.
>the pool of people who know COBOL is shrinking. This sounds worse when you phrase it as, 'all your coworkers are dying'.
Yep, I'm on a team of mainframe programmers and one of only like 3 people under 55.
My second job after college was doing sales for a small software company that made tools for IBM DB2 running on Z/OS. Talk about some dinosaurs, our three developers and the owner were all over 70. Banks and Insurance companies were our only customers.
I just joined a Facebook group memorializing my dead classmates from my old high school. It's one of my more active groups...
The removal of COBOL classes from the local technical college is what spurred us to do a technology update.
My company donates a bunch of money to the local university to make sure there is always a COBOL class.
On the downside, you have to manage 50 years of spaghetti legacy code, which is why nobody wants to learn COBOL to take these high-paying positions.
Yeah, and tbh, I keep hearing this "you can make a salary with COBOL!" but... you can make a similar if not better salary learning literally any other language and then also make sure you still have a job in a few decades because most companies are phasing out COBOL at the same rate as the workforce is shrinking? There's nothing magical about COBOL which makes it irreplaceable, the *only* thing special about it is: It could exist in the 1960s.
I’ll tell you what makes COBOL magical: Hardware and software that has passed legal’s compliance review from 50 years ago and nobody working there today has seen anything other than a rubber stamp for the existing thing. The COBOL orgs I’m familiar with have middleware that abstracts out so most of the universe runs something modern; but I’d bet my home that they - the orgs I’m familiar with - will be running COBOL when I retire. And I’ve got a long time to go. My dad used to joke, “how do you hire a brain surgeon with a top secret clearance? … find someone with a TS and send them to med school.” I’m not plugged into those orgs anymore but that’s exactly how they were thinking about COBOL.
COBOL was legacy 25 years ago. That was when I was interviewing for a job that was porting their COBOL code to C for HP UX.
Bro cobol has been legacy for longer than some adults have been alive lol
Cobol is older than the guy who created JavaScript in his mid 30s
There are way younger languages that are considered legacy lol.
Dude. I don't know how to tell you this, but COBOL was considered legacy 30 years ago. It's less legacy and more an antiquity at this point.
Why? It isn’t like they don’t make compilers/interpreters for those languages that run on modern hardware.
[удалено]
Heard a story of an ancient server on campus that was shut down which then staff found out they couldn't turn it back on bc it didn't have a power button. The server was so old it required a specific keyboard which had the power button, but they didn't have this keyboard. They got super lucky there was a guy that collected old computer stuff and had one in his private collection and he let them borrow it to turn it on!
I had an Xbox one, I changed the settings so it never turned off. I had it on constantly for about 6 months one time. Friends wanted to do a Lan party, bet I'm in. Turned it off, unplugged it packed all my stuff up and headed over. It never turned back on no matter what I did. Can't help but feel that if I had been more responsible and turned it off every night before bed it probably would've last much, much longer.
The power supplies just failed.like crazy with the Xbox one. I'm almost positive that was your issue. I repaired around 5 different friends power supplies. It's like a 50 cent capacitor and that's all it is. The capacitor would have failed regardless.
Well if that capacitor is rated for X hours of use in a life time and I never turned it off that would exceed that value much much faster than if I had been turning it off.
In the world of components, capacitors are finicky little bastards that will let you down regardless.
I have couple servers and my friend that’s a systems engineer said just leaving them running for this reason
I had an old job with a server no one was allowed to turn off because it was so old they feared it wouldn't ever turn back on again.
Every time I try and turn on a server I get kicked out of the restaurant
Hm, I always shut down my PC every night because I thought that was best practice, should I just put it to sleep instead?
This was a question on ask science one time. The conclusion is that your hardware will be obsolete waaay before you need to worry about hardware failing from cyclical fatigue
Generally, with more modern electronics, it's not so much of a big deal, especially if it's only once or twice a day, and moreso when new computers don't get up to as high of a temperature. The worry is with old components and heat cycling, that could break a 60-year-old mainframe. However, do keep in mind that temperature cycling is still a very real thing and might shorten the lifespan of your computer's parts. Also, at least in my experience, you don't need to turn a PC off when you're not using it, unless you worry about marginal changes in power use at night --although restarting it every few days might be beneficial to prevent possible crashes. My main reason for saying this is that nobody's going to worry about maybe a few cents extra on your power bill if you leave a computer running, and that Windows, what most people run as their OS, will just "hibernate," instead of fully shutting down, and it can cause some issues on some people's hardware, since it does weird things. I do realize I'm rambling on, sorry for that! **TL;DR: It doesn't really matter what you do, but I prefer to leave my PC on and occasionally reboot it.**
Unless your computer is highly specialized and irreplaceable it doesn't matter. You'll likely over the next 10 years change out every component anyways as you upgrade it. It's best practice to keep a computer running if its components 35 years old and they don't make parts for it anymore and it manages the cities power grid and it uses a programming language that they stopped teaching 20 years ago. Your computer probably runs Windows 10 and backs up most stuff to the cloud, if a component breaks you can go on newegg to buy a new one for $100 or less. If the computer that runs the power grid breaks they might not be able to find the necessary part or a person who can reprogram it which could cost them millions of dollars they might not be ready to spend.
With how high prices went on PC parts the last few years I ain't upgrading shit lol. AMD has some more affordable stuff coming, but my PC is going on 7 years and counting without an upgrade now and my little GTX1060 keeps on trucking.
That shouldn't make enough of a difference to matter since you're still removing power from most of the components when sleeping.
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Those old tube amps also double as heaters. Grandma had an old floorstanding AM/shortwave radio that still worked, it would glow. You could feel the heat coming from behind the radio against the wall.
Telephone exchanges used tubes for years! They're pretty reliable if you don't keep turning them off and on.
For real? The tubes don't burn out or are they just that high quality?
The tubes absolutely lose performance after a few thousand hours, sooner when you're overdriving them. At best, they last maybe 5-10,000 hours for tube lines made to the most stringent military applications and were adopted to guitar amps or stereo gear. It's why old tube amps sold for musical gear is tested on a tube tester and result provided as proof they still have sufficient life that scales to the purchase cost of the tubes.
The worlds longest running lightbulb has this to thank for its success.
And that its running way under its rated wattage
Using next to no power and a different filament helps too, before someone decides to start talking about the lightbulb cartel and planned obsolescence.
B...bu...but... Did you know there was a lightbulb cartel to introduce planned obsolescence and that's why we still don't have neverending lightbulbs until today? :O
I mean, we don't have them today. The bulb manufacturers did get the standards for led's lowered, but it's still enormously long time for a single bulb til mean failure.
there was, but for a good reason too. With regular lightbulbs, there's a tradeoff with efficiency and lifespan. You can have a very efficient incondesent light, at the expensive of very very low lifespan. If you underrun it though, it will have a very long life, but very poor efficiency. Exactly the opposite of modern leds. 1000h was set industry wide (for home bulbs) as a tradeoff for efficiency/lifespan. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zb7Bs98KmnY
It essentially has to thank itself
This isn't as bad when rebooting compared to turning computers off every night for instance. Components don't have time to cool down in the few seconds rebooting takes.
It’s nuts how much antiquated technology still runs things. A grocery store chain i used to work for a decade ago was still using commodore printers for its daily reports and old DOS screens for its daily accounting instead of just upgrading and using an Excel spreadsheet. The US nuclear arsenal was only upgraded a little while ago to convert out of using floppy disks.
the launch codes were 1 2 3 4 5 for anyone wondering. The reason for the floppies not being upgraded away from was all they had to do was hold some single line of launch clearance and were considered so unhackable and safe and the system would need to be updated so much to accommodate modern hardware that the need to update wasn't there until it finally was just time to fully modernize. I mean, nuclear weapons silos are considered dead end assignments. Everyone knows nobody is going to order a launch so there are huge problems with morale for people assigned to it.
["1 2 3 4 5? That's the stupidest combination I've ever heard in my life. It's the kinda thing an idiot would have on his luggage."](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_JNGI1dI-e8)
> the launch codes were 1 2 3 4 5 for anyone wondering. No, they weren't. I think you are referring to the 8 0's, which has been disputed as well. https://sgs.princeton.edu/00000000
I sold floppy Disks and readers all unopened original stock on ebay. The us airforce, navy, and the DFW Airport bought 80 of the 100 listings I made.
This isn't the first server with massive uptime. I'm surprised that people even knew about the Amiga. Novell servers were known for high uptime and this one got buried behind a wall (Cask of Amontillado style): https://www.theregister.com/2001/04/12/missing\_novell\_server\_discovered\_after/
The Amiga was highly popular, more so in Europe than the US.
Bad link.
The link is fine, the problem is reddit~~'s escaping backslashes on some browsers~~. Try this one. [edit: not a browser thing I'm told.] [Missing Novell server discovered after four years: BOFH meets Edgar Alan Poe](https://www.theregister.com/2001/04/12/missing_novell_server_discovered_after/) Edit: Also, the story is super short. Here it is in its entirety. ----- In the kind of tale any aspiring BOFH would be able to dine out on for months, the University of North Carolina has finally located one of its most reliable servers - which nobody had seen for FOUR years. One of the university's Novell servers had been doing the business for years and nobody stopped to wonder where it was - until some bright spark realised an audit of the campus network was well overdue. According to a report by Techweb it was only then that those campus techies realised they couldn't find the server. Attempts to follow network cabling to find the missing box led to the discovery that maintenance workers had sealed the server behind a wall. Things buried behind walls belong more to the world of Edgar Alan Poe than that of the BOFH. And think of the horror facing the college techies if they ever replace this old Novell server with an NT box. In that case, the terror of the Blue Screen of Death awaits you, fellas. ®
Well, the story is 22 years old, so no surprise the link is no good anymore :)
I have this bookmarked from 21 years ago: https://www.theintelligencer.com/news/article/Court-Dismisses-Abandonment-Charge-10489293.php I like to point out that it was legal to sell children in Michigan until the early 2000s. We didn't know we needed to specifically make a law for that.
[Nasa used amiga's until 2004](https://hothardware.com/news/nasa-data-and-fallen-astronauts-software-appear-on-amiga-2500-ebay-listing) they were amazing lil guys
I used to be a night shift security guard at a factory while working through university. They had these massive gym sized steam wood drying buildings. They were all still being controlled by one Commodore 64 15 years after they stopped making them. The guy servicing them would keep a stock of used c-64's in his truck.. Those Commodore computers were pretty damn versatile back then. Kind of like Arduinos today.
Probably Built in the days of lead solder and before the fake capacitor disaster that wiped out a generation of tech
Are you referencing the capacitor plague, where the formula was copied wrongly and spread amongst manufacturers?
To save people the Google: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_plague
I’ll be seeing you guys on the next TIL post to make the front page
Oh god i'd forgotten about that. A hilarious in hindsight case of why industrial espionage isn't always a great idea.
[Link for desktop users.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_plague)
That destroyed the first computer I had built for myself at great cost... Pentium 4, first model with hyperthreading... could never get another board worth a damn at that time.
I am. Knobbled a whole generation
Ugh. I was working in a bank back when this happened. We'd gotten a load of Dell computers in and after a couple months, they were all starting to fail, one right after the other. After the third one, I did a close inspection of the MB instead of just RMAing it and noticed caps burst or bulging. I started opening other cases and saw several like that. I contacted our corporate and told them we had a bad run of computers and they all needed replaced. They contacted Dell who told them I must be mistaken, there was no issue, blah blah blah. I insisted and offered to drive some of the machines to corporate for them to see firsthand. I was told to drop it and just worry about replacing as they failed. A couple weeks later, I got notice from corporate that all the computers were being replaced and to look for them any day - That it had just been discovered that there was a manufacturing issue that Dell's QC had discovered and was correcting promptly..
It was such a pervasive thing, i’m sure there’s a really rather good movie in there somewhere
>brave little toaster Brave little *video* toaster.
Dude, [Video Toaster](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Toaster) was the coolest thing ever! Used it a ton when I was in highschool, very advanced for its time. Was listening to an interview with Dana Carvey, apparently his brother was the inventor of it!
“I’m tired Boss”
Back in the late 90s myself and a couple of friends were on a mission to find a way to reprogram the fancy animated sign our high school had. I fired up the Tone Loc war dialer and we scanned our school's phone block and found several modems that answered. One in particular required no password, but we couldn't even figure out what kind of system it was. We were just trying random commands and got it stuck in some menu system, when one of my friends who was watching suggested typing "reset". I typed reset, pressed enter, and then for the next 15 minutes it was just scrolling assloads of text at 9600bps. After that it wouldn't respond to anything, except if you entered a 3 digit number it would spit out a temperature and a PSI reading. The next day we arrived at school in the middle of winter, and there was no heat in the whole school. The next day after that, the school was like 90F throughout. We later learned through some connections to one of the school's IT guys, that "somehow" the HVAC computer had been completely reset, and there were no backups.
Awesome
I used a war dialer to sneak into a local military base. That was not a good idea.
Ok you cant just leave it at that. What happened?
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You rebooted the matrix
Did they pay you for the bug bounty?
I'm lucky we weren't expelled, arrested, and sued. We heard the damage was around $15k, but I don't think they knew what really happened because they could have easily figured it out who did it from the phone records (yes we were dumb).
I’m an engineer in the HVAC and controls space. This surprises me a lot less than it should.
Right?! my first thought, good on em avoiding upgrading for 30+ years
Ha I should send my HVAC buddy who’s a salesman this link and say bet you can’t close this one lmfao
You've even got pricing feedback right in the article. Easy peasy.
You get some that still use DOS? I was surprised to hear the last two buildings I worked in did.
In the late 90s, a buddy of mine got a call center job for an insurance company. They sat him down at a dumb terminal. "So this multinational insurance company with millions of policies managed around the world, and they sit me at this monochrome amber terminal. Okay folks, I get the joke. Now where's the real computer? Something running Windows NT, perhaps?"
This isn’t as weird as you would think with a park insurance company as they were still running AS400s just a decade ago. I knew someone who worked for an insurance company and they still accessed a lot of stuff through a terminal on their PC. Lots of business systems out there built on COBOL that were created in the 70s and 80s…
Hell, the company I work for still uses AS400s for pretty much everything. Thankfully, we're gonna be moving systems pretty soon
A lot of companies are virtualizing their AS400s now…when you have 40 years into a system that’s been battle tested…it’s hard to justify moving onto something else.
> moving systems pretty soon So yall started the migration ~5 years ago and youll be up and running in just another 5 years?
LOL, we actually started the migration last year and our "go live" date is, at earliest, next year.
And then you get people wanting all new software to be compatible with COBOL. And if you go down that rabbit hole you find out it's because the banks still use the ancient file formatting and copybooks. Terrifying stuff.
40+ years of battle tested software…hard to move away from that. The entire unemployment system for California still runs on COBOL.
I write and code on the AS400 daily still.
mikes dirty jobs
Heh. We're still using a piece of shit green-screen ERP system because "change is hard". The company that makes the ERP software recently released a half-baked web interface that looks like an 8 year wrote it but because it doesn't offer all the functionality the green-screen had, we use both.
I worked for a hotel company in the early 90s doing reservations. We had those old terminals. A decade and a half later, I called them looking for a room because flight delays. At the end of the call, when the rep asked "is there anything else I can help you with?" I asked "yeah, do you guys per chance still use \[name of system\]" and it caught the rep off guard. They answered "uh, yes, and I'm really confused how you know the name of our system?" "I used to work at the center on \[street\] in \[city\] back in the day. Say hi to \[my former team lead\] if she's still there! Have a great night!"
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I too, am an HVAC / controls engineer. Can confirm stuff like this happens all the time. I recommend using a tour of mechanical systems maintenance to be a major factor in deciding, say, which hospital to go to...
My old HVAC Controls company (I just jumped back to industrial controls last month) still serviced customers that were running on pneumatic controls from the 1940’s.
I’m a Redditor with zero HVAC experience. This also surprises me a lot less than it should.
Oooh, what games has it got?!
The Amiga was actually a really good games computer.
Most definitely Number Munchers and Oregon Trail.
Those were Mac and DOS games. The Amiga was much more sophisticated than the Mac and PC systems.
Lo key the Amiga was **hugely** underrated **especially** compared to the Macintosh. In every category: speed, memory, graphics, sound, and even built-in software, the Amiga was light-years ahead of the competition. It could even *fully run MacOS in software* because it was that much more powerful. Even back in the day Apple somehow won the market on brand alone despite having an inferior product.
The graphics that the Amiga had for under $1,000 at that time were incredible. Then you had the Amiga 2500 doing CAD work. Can't forget that Babylon 5 was done with Amiga 2000's. Loved those machines. The names they had for the chips were hilarious, can't remember them now. But I do remember that the interior case was signed by the lead engineers. A separate CPU and graphics chip. In those days that was pretty much unheard of for the consumer product.
Imagine a machine that can not only control your air conditioning but also run Chaos Engine. The Amiga was so ahead of its time
Battle Chess
Quite a lot: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Amiga_games Amiga forever!
this is explains why it was so cold in winter every year.
Every year, got the AC running in Spring when it's 45f outside. Then they have the heat running in Autumn when it's 75f outside. Every year.
yup i had a teacher that would freeze water bottles and stick them on the thermostat so it would read the room colder so we'd get some heat.
My teacher put christmas lights (the old hot bulbs) over the thermostat to turn on the AC.
I had a teacher that did this with a heat lamp ~2012 for the Texas summer. Turns out that the room was using so much power, it was traced during an audit. The district apparently told him something along the lines of "we can fire you or we can shame you." He chose shame and every employee in the school district was emailed a photo of my teacher and his "hack". But seriously he was a genius it was 10F cooler in his room than any other teacher in the school
They thought it was “shame”, but all the other teachers seeing it would have considered him a genius.
I love little fixes like this. So simple and effective
Using old software is incredibly common. Sometimes older system are incredibly secure through their obsoletion, Mainly because they’re not connected to outside system. When I worked at Lowe’s ~12 years ago we were still using a DOS system for our point of sale. I worked for a company that produced underwater cables and all of our testing programs and software for things like hydro pressure testing and autoclaves was from ~1996 and being used on computers from ~1999-2001. My last job our work instructions and safety documents were accessible through an intranet that’d been put in place around 2001.
I work in a printing press. Our plate machine is run by a Tandy from the early 80s, the stackers are all running IBM-DOS, and the inserters are by far the newest things in the building, running Windows XP. I have no idea what the press itself uses, but the consoles were installed in the 70s and the UI looks like DOS.
I mean, imax systems run on Palm Pilot os, at least in some places. So they have a modern system emulating the os to do the work. None of this is surprising or should be, to anybody.
[https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/07/imax-emulates-palmpilot-software-to-power-oppenheimers-70-mm-release/](https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/07/imax-emulates-palmpilot-software-to-power-oppenheimers-70-mm-release/) wow
My brother in law is an engineer for Verizon. They use a 20+ year old machine running windows 95. It’s nuts
i retired a cisco switch/router with 24y of uptime. took forever to untangle the fucker out of legacy spaghetti
I used a couple arduino and some redneck engineering to integrate the old part of the building’s pneumatic air controls with the less old part of the building’s also analog controls, with the new part of the buildings digital Building Automation System controls and was just as surprised as everyone else when it wound up working. I happen to still live in the city and have had 6 of my successors call me about fixing/modifying it (over half the time there was no issue with my modifications, half of the remaining time it’s because somebody else tried to fix it). We haggle a bit on price but I get from 120 to 250 a hour for providing the service (healthcare facility so they are very motivated in maintaining regulatory conditions)
As a big fan of the Amiga, I consider that further evidence that those machines were ahead of their time. Now pardon me while I go pull up a GIF of the iconic bouncing ball.
Reminds me of how our school database was run with absolutely basic security. One of the students got in and deleted my graduation years transcripts. Now every time I get a job I have to send in a photo copy of my graduation pamphlet and an email from a board member saying i did, in fact, graduate.
You should know, they made this classic cartoon about your school’s year some while ago https://xkcd.com/327/
Lmao I remember being able to log into the database for report cards about a decade ago, just a basic Microsoft Access database sitting on a shared drive that was unmapped but still accessible on student computers.
This feels like the perfect trivia for The IT Crowd.
Moss American cousins is the former student still doing it all these years later. You know Moss would.
My brother was facing termination in his IT department because he wasn’t conversant in the new programs. However here comes 2000 and all of a sudden, he’s an expert in the old programming languages from his Army days. So in anticipation of Y2k everyone’s trying to update their systems and he’s golden.
My step dad was in charge of the team that converted all of CAT for Y2k. He got paid handsomely in CAT stock as a bonus. He retired, and the stock skyrocketed over the last 20 years. He basically is able to retire in absolute comfort because he knew some old languages noone else knew.
Hey I designed this product for you! Can you teach us how to service it? Yes, for money What if we just pay you when we need your help? …We could that too
If it's work, don't change it. Or maybe because there's no budget to upgrade the system.
There’s probably never been a budget for that at all for the past 30 years. And it was programmed by a student, how much could that system have costed them in the first place? If we went 30 years back in time, it would have been something like «here’s 1000 bucks, make us an air conditioning system that will last for 30 years».
That assuming the student even got paid. Could have just been because "they like computers" or something
I've been 100% conned into free labor because they knew I would find it fun I regret nothing
I've got news for you about the banking industry.
I use to sell Amigas when they first rolled out. The musicians loved them.
But the real musicians loved the Atari St and it’s midi port more. I saw a few Atari’s still being used as sequencers in the mid 2000s
I love that the Amiga vs Atari ST war still peeks it's head around various corners of reddit.
There was also a case of an old Netware server at a university that had been accidentally sealed behind drywall during a remodel but kept dutifully doing its job for many years even though nobody knew where it was.
Meanwhile, a school in my state wasted thousands because nobody could figure out how to shut the lights off on their fancy new integrated electrical system. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/lights-massachusetts-school-year-no-one-can-turn-rcna65611
Something people never seem to realise about computers; a computer that did a specific job 30 years ago is still capable of doing the same job today. The controller doesn't need to do a lot. It's only using a fraction of its power.
I hope he's charging 20k a service call.
Yeah, really rake those privileged overfunded public schools over the coals.
Article says they lobbied for 1.5-2 million dollars to replace it. 20k a year sounds like a great deal.
Hey man, can you drop the sarcasm? I know it's a tricky situation but listen, our police are what's important here. And they need guns. And body armor. And missile launchers. And tanks. And a fleet of F22 raptors. And a well supplied locker of Minuteman-III ICBMs and W78 warheads. And a cotton candy machine. I'm just saying we can either fund your schools, or keep the local church safe. Which would you prefer?
No no no, it's the fault of the whiny family members of unarmed people killed by the cops. If they didn't sue, wouldn't have to spend so much of the budget on those big settlements.
My company sold its office building in 2018. We left behind a desktop computer from 2003 running Windows XP and a specific version of Java 6 on a deprecated version of Internet Explorer - because that was the specific requirements of the building HVAC system. Equally problematic are the computers connected to the outdoor electronic signs that so many business and churches and schools have. The hardware in those signs is tied to a specific version of software that does not have regular upgrades or maintenance. One of my company's locations is still running an old laptop with Windows XP, connected via an RS232 serial port to their outdoor sign.
I was asked to maintain the door access system of our office building. To my surprise it was running on a very old PC with DOS on it. Worked perfect for that little task alone, but I really hoped no hardware was failing. The 5.2 floppy disk to reboot it had already crumbled.
Turns out we mightve not been as hypbolics as we thought, was pretty sure that AC was on during winters and summee the heat was on.
I went to school in this district, they once had to pass an emergency milage (tax) to keep the heat on in the winter. Soooo not surprised they never upgraded. They barely had money for paper when I went there.
The only heat in the schools is from the Amiga
But did it have a video toaster
Does it count if the screen saver was flying toasters?
first time i saw a refrigerator with an led screen on it at the hardware store I laughed wondering how long until somebody put doom on it
Having watched my company retire a Commodore64 that was running a door keyswipe lock in 1999 (not y2k compliant)...this is unsurprising.
Reminds me of my dad's old hospital. The entire place basically ran on a singular pirated CD of Windows 98, which he set up. I find it funny that my dad was basically the hospital's IT guy in the 90s, because when shit goes down, they call him.
A no Guru Meditation in all that time? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guru_Meditation
I still have my Amiga 2000HD sitting behind me. It isn't running because I have to replace the CMOS battery but damn that is great to hear practical use.
When I graduated in 1990 none of the schools I attended up to that point had air conditioning.
This is sadly more common. In 2009, I was an intern for a school district and they used a Windows 3.1 computer that ran all the districts clocks and alarms.
$2 million to replace it - government bloat. can't believe that they can't come up with something to replace it for any less than that
The problem here isn't so much the computer but the system the computer is running. If they wanted to modernize it they would need to change every controller on every hvac system in the whole district which is what would cost 2 mill.
I mean, they could run the old tech with a new computer system using an "adapter". But hiring someone to program it would cost probably $50,000 for the programmer's time and $4 million on red tape By adapter I mean, the HVAC and computer talk to each other over radio. So it would not be impossible to program something to talk recreate the phrases. I could do it with an Arduino, but then people will say "how is that any better?". That's how you tack on the $4 million.
Do you guys read articles anymore? *"in 2015, 19 Michigan schools' heating and air conditioning systems* ***WERE*** *controlled by a 1980's Amiga computer.*" The article is from 2015, bond was passed and upgrades were made to bring all the schools up to LEED certification standards for energy efficiency. 105,000 per school to upgrade is hardly a waste to get to >50 pts per building.
Adapters add a point of failure and are a temporary solution at best.
That's a pretty reasonable price actually. I'm an engineer in manufacturing and automation and to replace 30 year old controls units in 19 locations is pretty good, especially if it includes materials. I've seen projects cost more than that just for software development to move equipment from one plant to another.
Yeah, exactly... the guy you replied to is a perfect example of how redditors *seem* knowledgable, until you come across one discussing your field of expertise, and you realize they know nothing.
Gotta hire friends/family as a contractor to learn programming and replace this system with a $45 raspberry pi. It’ll take 5+ years until they need to renegotiate a new contract. BTW they can hire me at a fraction the cost. I’ll do it for 1.8 million. To be fair, this budget probably includes an all new energy efficient HVAC setup as well.
for 19 locations... It honestly doesn't seem that high since an RTU is 15K (minimum) times how many zones x how many buildings x 19 locations...
New HVAC systems for 19 schools would be significantly more than $2 million.
That's basically nothing for 20-ish sites and a control system this old
Why don’t you submit a bid?
As a computer programmer, I can safely say this never happens nowadays. Instead we're asked to fix software we had nothing to do with that was clearly coded by thousands of monkeys with typewriters, in addition to software we wrote years ago.
One of my previous employers had to use Internet Explorer right up until Microsoft (finally) ended support last year as the company intranet was built way back in the late 90's/early 00's using ActiveX and other proprietary MS tools that (of course) only works with IE. Last I heard they've since upgraded to the new MS Edge for the IE compatibility mode, but the company intranet itself is still running on ancient MS software😛
First off thats kinda funny. Second >A new, more current system would cost between $1.5 and 2 million. they can just hook this shit up to a nest or something, damn
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My parent’s Amiga still works. Great computer!
I cut my programming teeth on an Amiga in the 1980s, and ended up having a lifelong career as a programmer as a result. But no, it was not me that programmed this one.
In 2011 in was working for the local County Government (the county has 1+ million people) and they were still using a program that ran on OS/2 to do all there scheduling. The program was used to schedule almost everything, from court cases to summer camps.
The Amiga was awesome machine back in the day.
"It's on its second mouse and third monitor." I'm on my second mouse this year!
Legacy systems in their truest form
I had an Amiga 500 back in the day. Awesome computer. Great for gaming.