Top 5 Submerging Technologies Pinpointed

An anonymous reader writes "Computerworld makes its picks of five 'submerging' (i.e. dying) technologies, as the article asks 'Where are the review committees for obsolete technologies?' The picks, made by 'corporate IT managers and analysts', include Windows 9x, client/server computing and Visual Basic 6."

Comments

Re:Backups

[pjrc]

Now, when a hard drive fails, what're you going to do? .... Transplant it to another hard drive?

Actually, a co-worker where I used to work did exactly that!

I believe he was upgrading some part of his PC and got the power connected backwards (loose socket on the drive perhaps). Or maybe something else caused it, but whatever it was the electronics on the drive were ruined, he didn't have a backup and the data on the drive was quite important.

So he went and purchased another drive, and actually ended up buying 2 or 3 drives that claimed to the same model. Lucky for him the drive wasn't that old, and despite there being a couple different versions of the drive with the same model number but different electronics, he got one that had the same board.

He desoldered the circuit boards from both drives and installed the electronics from the good one into the dead one. It actually worked. He managed to boot the computer up and copy all his files to one of the servers on the network. He then threw both drives away and installed one of the drives with the different circuit board, reinstall the OS and other stuff and copied his data back from the server.