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Commodore PC Still Controls Heat and A/C At 19 Michigan Public Schools
jmulvey writes: Think your SCADA systems are outdated? Environmental monitoring at 19 Grand Rapids Public Schools are still controlled by a Commodore Amiga. Programmed by a High School student in the 1980s, the system has been running 24/7 for decades. A replacement has been budgeted by the school system, estimated cost: Between $1.5 and 2 million. How much is your old Commodore Amiga worth?
The alternative to using the term "PC" to describe IBM PCs and their descendants is to use some horribly convoluted terminology, along the lines of "Oh no, this isn't a Mac, this is a computer that implements standards comprising a descendant of the IBM PC architecture."
PC comes from "IBM PC". While the PC in those five letters were the initials of "Personal Computer", the name referred to a specific family of computers. You wouldn't use "PC/AT" to describe the latest Mac on the grounds that "But... it is a Personal Computer with Advanced Technology!" Likewise, if someone gave you a 3.5" disc in the 1980s and said "This has a PC emulator on it!" you wouldn't say "Ahem, my Amiga already is a personal computer, I don't need to emulate one on it." PC was understood to mean IBM PC based.
The Commodore Amiga was a personal computer. It was not a PC - well, not unless you added the Sidecar thingie, one of the Zorro 2/3 emulator cards, or ran one of the PC emulators, anyway..
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
"PC comes from "IBM PC"."
No, it doesn't. It was in use before there was an IBM PC, along with "personal computer" and "microcomputer." History proves you wrong.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
The problem is that the equipment at the 19 buildings is all built to use some kind of radio modem. Apparently retrofitting that equipment to use some more modern means of communication is going to be costly. They've tried to do it before and simply couldn't get around the requirement to continue using those radio modems. The radio modems are the heart of why it needs to be upgraded because they are prone to interference, for example the walkie talkies the staff use interfere and cause the system to not function properly. This equipment is all much older than the Amiga, which it's self was a replacement for another central control unit that was decommissioned because replacement parts were getting to expensive. The Amiga was a good fit because it was actually able to interface with a compatible radio modem.
A pi with some shell scripts controlling commercial scale heating and cooling system?
No.
Fuck no.
Jesus fucking christ no.
This isn't your home automation project were the worst thing that goes wrong is you don't get to spy on your cat while you're at work.
This is a serious deployment controlling a whole lot of non-trivial hardware. More importantly it's pivotal to the operation of the school itself. Fuck up the climate control for a week during any kind of unusual weather and you'll beg for a 2 million dollar fix when you need to unfuck the whole school year so your students can get their mandated educational hours.
2M quote isn't to replace some old amiga with an equivalent off the shelf PC. Considering they'll have to evaluate the entire system from boilers to blowers to ensure that it can be coupled properly with a modern control unit that's really not out of hand. They will probably have to replace some equipment that's incompatible or broken. That's a lot of man hours from skilled professionals. That's probably a lot of specialized not-cheap equipment too.
Also don't forget this is a school. Regulations regarding health and safety are much more strict. They're probably required to bring anything they touch up to current code by law. (This alone is why you see schools chugging along in really old buildings with really old infrastructure. Cost of code updates exceeds the cost of building whole new buildings. Renovations are essentially impossible.)
I do the IT for schools.
The largest, most complex heating system I've ever seen is a bunch of thermostats, pumps, temperature sensors and boiler start-up times in a piece of crappy HTML running on a boiler control system which costs 1% of what the heating system cost (and most of that shit is software licensing and support, not programming).
Seriously, it gives a nice diagram with all the in and out temperatures for multiple boilers, spread over the entire site, with temperature reading for other places (including external), and a "program" (really just a table of values) for when to start up in the morning depending on what the outside temperature is and/or whether the system's water temperature is ramping up as normal in that area.
Honestly, the control part is fucking simple. It's not so simple to have something controlling 30-year-old systems that still running on a 30-year-old system, but the actual job it's doing is pretty minimal.
A modern system might run proper cabling to / wireless sensors that don't interfere but would basically be the same thing. More likely, the system is just being replaced completely, including the majority of the HVAC equipment (or at least the centralised units if not the ducts / outlets / radiators / whatever).
In all the schools I've ever worked there are rooms full of boilers all over that cost millions. Usually they are run from a control panel with a tiny microprocessor and - if you're lucky - some kind of serial or Ethernet controller somewhere.
The hard part is not the software, or the schedules, or the algorithms involved, it's keeping the system running and integrating the parts you want to work with the system you want. Boiler manufacturers on that scale tend to want you to buy their controllers, and won't play well with anything else without a huge premium on the hardware.
The original programmer is still around, and occasionally does some maintenance on the programmer -- he even comments extensively in the comment section for the linked news story about the specific challenges they face. (He's "Jeff").
The $2MM will be used for a general upgrade of all the heating/cooling facilities, which will include more modern control systems. Many of the systems that used to be controlled by the Amiga have already been replaced, and the Amiga doesn't manage those any more :)
I used to work for an HVAC controls company. Most controls contractors have a specialty, whether it be hospitals, schools, commercial offices, or whatever. The one I worked for specialized in schools. We would typically get the entire school district's business all at once, but individual buildings would be upgraded or added to over time. But occasionally, we would get a large project that involved multiple buildings or an entire take-over of a whole district's HVAC controls.
I have personally seen, held, and deposited a check for over $1 million from one such project. And that was the 20% kick-off payment. We outfitted 11 schools with complete direct-digital controls (none of that old pneumatic stuff), a web-facing control server, and a bunch of wire-runs to connect it all together. The price (as you may have calculated) was around $5 million. This was 10+ years ago, too.
That project covered a high school, 2 middle schools, and 8 elementary schools. The district administration offices were on the high school campus as well, and were part of the same system that covered the high school building itself.
The high school had (from memory):
- 300+ fan powered terminals (zone controller and thermostat for each)
- 7 or 8 air handling units (multi-program controller for each)
- 12 roof-top units (single-program controller for each)
- 1 network bridge
- 1 web-facing server
The middle schools had:
- 150 FPT zones (average)
- 3 or 4 AHU's each
- 6-8 RTU's each
- 1 network bridge each
The elementary schools had:
- 50 FPT zones (average)
- 1 or 2 AHU's each
- 3 or 4 RTU's each
- 1 network bridge each
All told, parts for that project cost us around $2-to-2.5 million. We generally bid things with a 100% markup over parts costs, which covered labor, design, documentation, management, and everything else. This company was and is profitable, but isn't making anyone wildly rich.
There is no pork in that barrel. It just costs money to build something like that.
You drone on about "history". Meanwhile, many of us LIVED through those years and yes indeed most of us non-kludge clone users would have viewed the branding of our chosen alternative as an INSULT.
Commie users certainly would have viewed their machine being called a "PC" as an insult. PCs were a brand associated with IBM and later Microsoft. It represented the ultimate in crapulence unworthy success.
I don't think DOS users in those days would have been happy to have their machines lumped in with Apples or Ataris either.
The generic non-brand terms were "home computer" and "microcomputer".
Some of us actually lived this shit and aren't just regurgitating bad wikipedia articles.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
The purchase of school AC systems is an arena in which organised crime seems to thrive. I have seen it first hand as a specialist employed for school AC systems. Units that use water towers are particularly suspect. In warmer states any boilers in a public school are highly suspect. For example I have seen a large twin boiler unit that was operated for 40 years that really did next to nothing yet it ran continuously. It only acted to feed a warming tray in the cafeteria and cost a ton of money every year. A simple electrical warmer that cost next to nothing could have easily done the job and since electric warmers warm quickly it could be turned on just before lunch and shut down after lunch. Those boilers probably cost well over one million to install and keep running. The reason why is someone powerful owned a company that got the installation contract. This stuff is continuous. If organized crime can get into county school that often have budgets over one billion per year and simply rake off 5% it can be perpetual and so expensive to investigate and prove that those who want to can't stop it from continuing.
The alternative to using the term "PC" to describe IBM PCs and their descendants is to use some horribly convoluted terminology, along the lines of "Oh no, this isn't a Mac, this is a computer that implements standards comprising a descendant of the IBM PC architecture..
IBM PC compatible or IBM PC clone is what your looking for.
You cut $200 off your utility bill in a few weeks with a new thermostat...
My conclusion is that you could not figure out how to turn in on an went without any sort of heat or AC for several weeks.
Because if it does break I'm not confident the vendor can get a replacement Commodore 64 out and installed in 24 hours.
There's a concept called "end-of-life" and it does not mean when the equipment finally dies.
Then you must have lived on Mars or something.
As someone who attended Atari user's group meetings as a kid, I can tell you first-hand that people got pretty annoyed and quickly corrected you if you referred to our machines as PC's. PC's were expensive boring turds that none of us wanted. Personal computer was acceptable. PC referred to IBM crap or a clone later on.
Couldn't take the three additional characters to write "Commodore Amiga"?
Yes, I know, the Amiga is technically a "PC", but since Commodore did actually release a line of PC clones that were actually branded "Commodore PC", I consider the headline inaccurate.
FC Closer