My modernest operating system is a current distro of Ubuntu.
Still in love with my Mac OS 10.6 (Snow Leopard) tax machine (offline).
I keep another machine of the same era (Intel Core2Duo) online with Win7Pro, for official paperwork/logins. Doesn't seem to be hacked / compromised, yet (what people usually say).
Also rocking modern Apple Silicon (M2Pro/3/4) which is impressive equipment, particularly considering their miniscule power usage. The current 15" MacBookAir will stream video for the majority of a day on a single charge, and from CostCo can be occassionally purchased for $849 (which includes an additional year of warranty).
Their excellent backward compatibility and longevity is both their strongest point and their eventual weakness. Part of it is likely because the same familiar desktop environment is also able to act as a server environment, and so it's had a huge sticking power.
I'd like to think that Linux as a platform for running such systems would have gotten a mention but it seems that BBC is unaware it exists.
> A while back we looked into upgrading one of the computers to Windows Vista. By the time we added up the money it would take to buy new licenses for all the software, it was going to cost $50,000 or $60,000 [£38,000 to £45,000]
I wonder if at some point virtualizing, and potentially adding a modern control layer on top of their current machines is a potential path forward.
Something irks me about the BBC using "ancient" to refer to something a few mere decades old. I know we use it that way but the irony seems to be lost here.
Some businesses are still using DEC PDP-11s, first released in the 1970s. Those are even more "ancient." Many of these are used for industrial controls, among other applications.
The article does not mention what OS is being used, but RT-11 was designed for "real-time" applications. That was released in 1973, so over 50 years ago.
Gosh - I'm surprised those still run. That the first computer I used back in 1978 or so. I see there's an emulator, SIMH, that will let you run PDP-11 stuff on Linux.
A call to action for anyone with a 5 1/4" floppy drive:
> The only thing missing from Grigar's collection is a PC that reads five-and-a-quarter-inch floppy disks, she says. Despite their ubiquity, the machines are surprisingly hard to find. "I look on eBay, Craigslist, I have friends out looking for me, nothing. I've been looking for six years," she says. If you have one of these old computers lying around, and it still works, Grigar would love to hear from you.
We encountered this recently - we have some monitoring software for a ride that was written in-house by a guy who no longer works for us. It was running on a Windows XP machine that needed connectivity via 2 serial ports.
We ended up creating a disk image then emulating the machine in Hyper-V and passing through 2 usb-based serial ports. Works like a charm!
Windows 7 was more stable. With XP I had to make a system image and restore it once a year or so when it got too glitchy. Though apart from that I liked XP.
It’s hilarious that people are claiming windows 3.1 or 95 is super stable, when in my life experience windows didn’t become super stable until Windows 7.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 38.8 ms ] threadStill in love with my Mac OS 10.6 (Snow Leopard) tax machine (offline).
I keep another machine of the same era (Intel Core2Duo) online with Win7Pro, for official paperwork/logins. Doesn't seem to be hacked / compromised, yet (what people usually say).
Also rocking modern Apple Silicon (M2Pro/3/4) which is impressive equipment, particularly considering their miniscule power usage. The current 15" MacBookAir will stream video for the majority of a day on a single charge, and from CostCo can be occassionally purchased for $849 (which includes an additional year of warranty).
People are upset because their hardware is still working??
Is it better if it just stopped working one day?
I'd like to think that Linux as a platform for running such systems would have gotten a mention but it seems that BBC is unaware it exists.
Which ended with Windows 10. There are a lot of old Win95 era games which do not run on Windows 10.
I wonder if at some point virtualizing, and potentially adding a modern control layer on top of their current machines is a potential path forward.
see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30505421
The article does not mention what OS is being used, but RT-11 was designed for "real-time" applications. That was released in 1973, so over 50 years ago.
> The only thing missing from Grigar's collection is a PC that reads five-and-a-quarter-inch floppy disks, she says. Despite their ubiquity, the machines are surprisingly hard to find. "I look on eBay, Craigslist, I have friends out looking for me, nothing. I've been looking for six years," she says. If you have one of these old computers lying around, and it still works, Grigar would love to hear from you.
We ended up creating a disk image then emulating the machine in Hyper-V and passing through 2 usb-based serial ports. Works like a charm!
I was happy with Windows XP, Windows vista, 7,8,8.1,10, and 11 added nothing to my quality of life that I can think of?
Just don’t connect it to the internet.
YMMV. TBH 7 was quiet stable compared with 10 and 11.