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PDP-11 Still Working In Nuclear Plants - For 37 More Years

Posted by Unknown on from the great-architectures-live-forever dept.

Taco Cowboy writes "Most of the younger /. readers never heard of the PDP-11, while we geezers have to retrieve bits and pieces of our affairs with PDP-11 from the vast warehouse inside our memory lanes." From the article: "HP might have nuked OpenVMS, but its parent, PDP-11, is still spry and powering GE nuclear power-plant robots and will do for another 37 years. That's right: PDP-11 assembler programmers are hard to find, but the nuclear industry is planning on keeping them until 2050 — long enough for a couple of generations of programmers to come and go." Not sure about the OpenVMS vs PDP comparison, but it's still amusing that a PDP might outlast all of the VAX machines.

4 of 336 comments (clear)

  1. If it ain't broke... by intermodal · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Honestly, it's a system that works. Everything is seen as disposable today, but really, the only reasons we end up getting rid of systems that works these days are either because of support issues (i.e. Microsoft's end of life abandonment of security updates for older products) or lack of available replacement hardware to swap in for failed or failing units.

    Honestly, without the need for protection from security holes related to the Internet (and the accompanying security patches), most office workers could get by on Windows 2000 machines with Pentium III processors with probably less than 1GB of RAM and Office 2000 for the foreseeable future.

    Not saying we haven't made advances, but I'm definitely saying that modern closed-source computing (Microsoft, Apple) is a system of planned obsolescence.

    --
    In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
    1. Re:If it ain't broke... by scsirob · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Sorry to burst your bubble, but that's not how it works in nuclear nor in aviation..

      One of the main reasons things are behind in those industries is paper trails. Rules and regulations. It takes forever and lots of money to get this gear certified. Once certified, it takes an act of God to change it.

      A PDP-11 isn't much more reliable than any other system. It has unreliable old-style linear power supplies, unreliable backplane connectors and all parts do fail eventually. Just because they weigh a hundred times more doesn't mean they are a hundred times more reliable.

      --
      To Terminate, or not to Terminate, that's the question - SCSIROB
    2. Re:If it ain't broke... by intermodal · · Score: 5, Insightful

      You seem to be equating this laundry list of things running at the same time with "need". Frankly, I'm not convinced that present-day "need" gets any more accomplished than was performed by what we had ten years ago in most businesses with the "needs" from then.

      I don't measure productivity in the number of bits pushed or number of programs used. I measure it in how useful those bits were and how much was usefully accomplished by those programs. You're simply justifying bloat.

      --
      In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
  2. Re:I cut my teeth on that CPU by swalve · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Yeah, but ironically fancier is cheaper. And now we have printers that take two minutes to boot up.