I was an IT tech in college, and one of our biology professors had a stack of ancient computers in a closet specifically because the electron microscope in his lab had to have a computer as a controller connected to it that ran Windows 3.1 and which had extremely specific hardware specs. He'd Frankenstein them together as parts quit, and was always on the lookout for this very specific computer on eBay. I had to get his microscope back running once by installing Windows and the controller software on the "new" computer, and it was actually really enjoyable. Brought back a ton of memories. But yeah, he is just buying time until his perfectly good microscope quits working all because he ran out of parts.

We have a very expensive engraver at our shop, probably to the tune of idk, $20-30 thousand. It's a pretty large, heavy machine. We use it all day long for identification tags on cabinet doors, push button tags, serial ID tags. Absolutely critical to our business and the company that made it went out of business so if the windows 7 laptop that has the software ever dies, it becomes useless.

Well, that's... not smart. Maintaining Win95 on actual hardware and implying they'd lose the data if those ancient pieces of crap went down? Big yikes. One thing is "how did you not virtualize this 10+ years ago", but man, backups??

Honestly maintaining or figuring out a migration method for these dinosaur systems would be my ideal job. I just love tinkering with these relics of the past but have no idea where to find this kind of work

There are companies that still sell new machines of archaic operating systems for this reason. I'd really recommend anyone in the situation of justletmeremember to look into it, all that stuff could be backed up and given redundancies pretty inexpensively considering the risk.

And yeah, it's really common. There is way more horrifying applications than research that rely on legacy machines. Everyone has heard that nuclear weapons required floppy disks until very recently, but it wasn't some isolated case. Stuff like that is all over the military despite the insane amount of money it steals.

I'm okay with this.

/s

I just got a 5 figure check for two weeks of work reverse engineering proprietary protocols for a super high end centrifuge.

Geeze, scientists! How hard is it to rip apart the hardware, hook up a JTAG debugger, attach an oscilloscope to various PCB traces, capture the data (praying to Linus that it's a switched protocol), find what might be some documentation from a sketchy Slavic website, call an ex who speaks Russian and have them translate, then reimplement the drivers in a modern operating system with modern realtime kernel modules.

It ain't ~~bathysphere~~ rocket surgery!

I agree with the goal of this, but don’t necessarily agree with its specific assertions.

Like yes, 100% we would be way better off if companies would actively support emulation by selling super-cheap any games that they otherwise have no interest in anymore.

But actually, yes, I do enjoy paying $40 for the remake of an old classic, if it’s done well.

The Spyro remaster from a few years ago was extremely well-done and I loved being able to play a favourite from my childhood on my computer. It was exactly the same game, only with modernised graphics. Well worth it.

Even better, Age of Empires 2: Definitive Edition. It upgraded the graphics, but also added an enormous amount of new content and (most importantly) quality of life features, all done in consultation with the community that had been playing the original game for 20 years at the time DE came out. It would be best if you could still buy the original 1999 version for five bucks, but frankly I doubt many people would if you could, because the Definitive Edition was done so well.

It’s obviously different when there’s a remake that’s nothing but a cheap cash grab. Or when there hasn’t been any type of modern update. I wish, for example, it was easier for me to get my hands on a copy of Battle for Middle-Earth 2 to play with my friends. But the company that made it isn’t even allowed to continue selling it, for complicated licensing reasons. Because copyright law sucks.

Cries in I just wanna play Landscape but "online only" that the pulled the plug on after like 3 months. Thanks Daybreak.