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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jmulvey writes: Think your SCADA systems are outdated?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?
So less than 2 dozen schools need to spend upwards of $2 million dollars to... control the HVAC?
Really?
That is the bigger issue, IMHO...
So have they run out of high school students ? Why not just give one of them a raspberry pi and have them program up a replacement. Hell, get 2 raspberry pis and keep one as spare.
Nullius in verba
Yeah. You could probably replace the thing with a raspberry pi .... at each location ... with a custom controller card.. and another one to control them all... for about $5,000
$2M ? Someone's pork barrel overfloweth.
Environmental control and monitoring becomes complicated when you're considering large buildings. At that size you need a system that controls how much your heat plant or cooling system is producing, as well as controlling fans and baffles to ensure that the cooking classroom, with a dozen ovens operating(or 30 computers) on the 3rd floor of the sunny side of the building stays comfortably cool while the the traditional English room on the shaded side of the first floor doesn't actually freeze.
The reason it's $2M is the amount of programming and equipment replacement necessary, standard government waste, and the fact that they're no longer willing to let students/staff do it.
I don't read AC A human right
It IS a PC, as in the generic sense of "personal computer". A Mac is a "PC" too. . .
I'm hoping that the $2 dollars is going to update a number of things, and not just the one system. Seems like you could rig up a VM to do the Commodore's work and a Raspberry Pi at each school to send the signals over the internet instead of OTA for probably about $5,000 in parts and $20k in labor.
Agreed. And the guy being interviewed seems to be on the same side of the argument we are. The media however are trying to spin this. I detect a hint of disdain in the tone of the anchorwoman as she goes over the list of repairs that were deemed a higher priority... Like replacing boilers, roofs, and removing asbestos... None of which are cheap. The bloody computer system works. It has its problems, but it works on 30 year old hardware. If it works on that there's no need to build out a 1.5 mil system to replace it. A modest modern desktop system to run the controller, upgrade the radios to get it off the communication frequency, and a good service contract with whoever you get that desktop from...you've got a system that'll last another 30 years for less than half the proposed budget.
So anyone who can write a program for that platform that is still running problem-free after 30 years deserves to be making stacks of cash in the embedded/IoT space.
Also, shameless plug: http://amiga30.com/
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
Parts for the computer are difficult to find, Hopkins said. It is on its second mouse and third monitor.
Try ebay or Craigs list? Lots of it out there...
Since this was made by a student, why not have a new student project to replace this thing usign a Pi or *duino board, which are all the rage these days? Or for an even more interesting learning experience, go with a Zed board? Surely those and your free extracurricular club labor would save you a couple bucks?
you're going to need a lot of thermostats and alot of other sensors and controls.
You're also going to need some way to keep the kids from screwing with them.
Yeah. You could probably replace the thing with a raspberry pi .... at each location ... with a custom controller card.. and another one to control them all... for about $5,000
$2M ? Someone's pork barrel overfloweth.
I think we're all forgetting that the HVAC system as a whole is that old. Pumps, valves, and compressors all have finite life spans. My first reaction was also to use some Rpi's at each location which could add up to under $200 per building I then considered the cost to forklift and upgrade the HVAC at each facility. This would be about right.
Coffee: The lifeblood of intelligence in civilization.
If they are only having problems with the hardware, why not just put an Amiga emulator on a new computer?
Popisms.com - Connecting pop culture
I'm not 100% sure it's governmental pork... commercial HVAC control systems can get hella expensive in a hurry, depending on what you're putting in. I suspect it's going to be more than just dropping in a new PC/server/whatever... a buttload of updated sensors and control equipment will likely have to go in along with it (esp. given the age).
Price it sometime, then scale that cost up for 19 large buildings. $2m comes to roughly $105k per school; as far as buildings of that size go, that ain't half bad.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Of course it is. "PC" and "personal computer" were in use well before the IBM PC came along.
Even Commodore called it a personal computer.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
I love that a 30 year old computer is doing the job just fine.
I love that a kid wrote the code ages ago, and presumably it has never even been patched.
I love that the Amiga was so damn rock solid that it has not had an emergent failure in 30 years.
I love that it uses walkie talkie beeps as a protocol
I love that somehow it is going to cost 2 million dollars to reproduce something a kid did in his spare time, presumably simply for the privilege of getting to play with a $1300 dollar computer.
And what do you do if a part dies? Where are you going to get parts for something that has not been manufactured for 20+ years?
Obviously it needs to be replaced just so you can have something that can be repaired. The $2mil probably includes upgrading a large part of the HVAC system. If you have a 20+ year old computer controlling the HVAC, then you probably have a 20+ old HVAC.
Just a Tuna in the Sea of Life
Environmental control and monitoring becomes complicated when you're considering large buildings.
And yet a high-school student from the 1980's was able to engineer a system with off the shelf computers and a little ingenuity. And managed to build a system that has lasted for 25 years.
"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
Pi plus some student programmers - should be done for $1500. Which begs the question - if it still works, why replace it?
In my old house, there was an analog thermostat.
This thermostat came with the house, probably cost $20, and worked just fine.
Me, being the foolhardy spendthrift I am, dropped TEN TIMES that on a fancy-shmancy programmable thing with all sorts of stupid, complicated bits inside.
As it turns out, my previous model--while perfectly functional--was really quite inefficient, and the new unit had pretty much paid for itself within a few weeks.
Doing things properly can save tons of money.
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
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.)
My Amiga would crash if I looked at it funny (then again, I had all kinds of things rigged up to it) -- although I remember doing the most amazing crap *ever* on a computer with that old Amiga 1000... Seriously, that was a wonderful, wonderful piece of hardware, and there's never been anything like it, even to this day. Dynamic ramdisk? We still don't have that in any other operating system.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
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.
You're also going to need some way to keep the kids from screwing with them.
When I was in school the sure fire way to get us to mess with something like a thermostat was to put a lock of some kind on it. It was usually the threat of meeting with the "The Board of Education" that kept us in line. "The Board of Education" was very similar to a cricket bat with holes drilled in it that our principal kept on the wall behind his desk, which was labeled, "The Board of Education" in bright red outlined in black.
I'm guessing that between Ritalin and the constant distraction of cell phones, things like thermostats really wouldn't be noticed by students today.
Well, at least this student did. God only knows what kind of unholy messes the others made. Or, for that matter, how much cost accrued silently through inefficiencies over 25 years.
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
My seventh grade Apple II teacher in 1983 called my Commodore VIC-20 a toy in front of the class. That's when I learned that I came from a "poor" family because we couldn't afford an Apple II. My parents got me a Commodore 64 the following year. I went through three C64 in the next ten years. My first PC after college was literally an old IBM PC/AT (286) that a roommate brought home work in 1995.
When I was going to GRCC (Grand Rapids Community College) in the late-90s I took a tour of the Grand Rapids Wastewater Treatment Plant (GRWWTP). They still used two commodore 64's (or were they 128's) to log sensor measurements for different pollutants. I believe for metals used in the automotive and chrome industry. They were nearly black they were caked with so much dirt and dust, but were still chugging along showing status on the attached TV monitor.
At the time (in my early 20s) I thought it was silly they were using such old computers. But now I think that as long as it keeps working there is no reason to replace it. When they eventually break they will need to be repaired or replaced, and likely replacement will be cheaper as the support for that platform is long gone. They'll use some fancy embedded computer, and it will chug along for 20 years and by that time, whatever embedded vendor they used is unlikely to assist in any way other than full replacement.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Remote, as in from China. Sigh.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I think it is PC to call all PC's PC
Why would it need to be replaced? It doesn't need USB, Bluetooth, Firewire, et al. No compelling reason to replace it.
My music project studio is running on Windows for Workgroups. All I need is MIDI. I don't need software plugins (I use hardware for that), I don't want it connected to the internet, I don't use it for any sampling or sample playback. And that's a circa 1993 machine that still works.
Eternity: will that be smoking, or non-smoking? I Corinthians 6:9-10
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.
When the Amiga system originally went in it was controlling well over 100 buildings throughout the district, including the entire GRCC campus at the time. The Amiga replaced the head-end of the system, which was experiencing expensive hardware failures every year ... and you couldn't get parts for that mini-computer on e-bay. It is essentially acting as a huge database (schedules, configurations, control programs, history, etc.), system manager, and monitoring system ("head-end") for the remaining 19 buildings HVAC systems. If the Amiga goes down, the buildings will continue to operate using the configurations last received, with most of the individual device controls being able to be manually overridden inside each building, albeit with less energy efficiency. What you will loose is the ability to change schedules/custom control code/configurations and the ability to centrally monitor the performance of the buildings.
Each building has one or more local control systems, and those systems communicate back to the central head-end over radio-modem (there was no district-wide network back then). Schedule and other control changes are sent to the buildings and alerts/reports are sent back. That old equipment in the buildings, even older than the Amiga, is what dictates the radio communications link. They incorporate specific protocols for keying up the radio that are not directly compatible with a newer serial to Ethernet type device that would seem like a logical replacement.
The control systems themselves gather temperatures, both inside and outside the building, look at trends and do predictive control of the equipment to accomodate scheduled use of various areas of each building. For the day, this was very advanced building control and offered significant energy savings, as well as comfort in the buildings.
Over time, as buildings have been updated, sold or replaced, the local controls withing those buildings have been replaced with newer/more modern controls that communicate with newer central control systems. Replacing these controls that are local to the buildings is what is responsible for the majority of the cost I would say.
As far as the Amiga system itself, I believe most of the components are still the original. The hard drive may have failed twice over the years, requiring a rebuild from backups. They did pick up or have donated a few Amiga systems to use as parts as needed, but the system has proven to be very resilient. Obviously, Monitors, Keyboards and Mice can only take so much use without needing to be replaced. Without this, the system likely would have become inoperable and unservicable many years ago, or been incredibly expensive to keep running.
From a technical stand point, the Amiga was selected because at the time it was the only "Personal Computer" (PC) that had a true pre-emptive multi-taskng operating system. It needed to be able to handle multiple processes simultaneously, including interfacing with the systems, maintaining settings in the database, monitoring the system as well as support for both local and remote access to the system simultaneously. Basically, its capabilities fit the need. While for nostalgia reasons I would hate to see it go, it has been 30 years and I think the system has done its job. Replacing a building's control system doesn't happen overnight, and when you are talking 19 buildings with ancient (yes I am calling myself ancient I guess) control systems, it is going to take money and time. The payback in energy savings, comfort and safe control of the buildings though I think justifies the cost.
Have a Day!
I still have two Amigas (500 and 1200). IM me and you can have both of them for just $500K - that's a savings of $1M over your upgrade costs! /snark>
How the bloody hell did you go through *three* of them? I only had one, and it lasted until I gave it away many years later.
You could murder someone with a Commodore 64 after fishing it out of a swimming pool filled with beer and it would still run fine.
And yet a high-school student from the 1980's was able to engineer a system with off the shelf computers and a little ingenuity. And managed to build a system that has lasted for 25 years.
And for all we know, it could be so blindingly inefficient that it's cost the school system hundreds of thousands or millions in wasted energy over that quarter century. See how uninformed assertions work?
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
You could murder someone with a Commodore 64 after fishing it out of a swimming pool filled with beer and it would still run fine.
Yes, after you replaced the power supply.
>a classmate posting something questioning the pre-emptive multitasking capabilities of AmigaOS
Yes. The Amiga ran on a 68000. The 68000 didn't support instruction restart. So you couldn't properly do preemptive multitasking with it. It needed the applications to cooperate with the interruptions. So an application could undermine the preemption. The 68010 fixed this problem. There were also unix based 68000 workstations that had two 68000s, one running a clock cycle behind the other, so the state of the CPU could be rewound and the instruction restarted when necessary.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
I'm not 100% sure it's governmental pork...
Get with the program! If it's not your own state/county/town, then it's always "pork"!
A school district of that size can save that much in a single year on their electric bill with an intelligent HVAC system.
I don't sell HVAC systems but I've seen this happen firsthand in a school district. Proper energy management programs are critical.
85% or so of a school district budget goes directly to personnel. That piece of the budget is considering operating expense. Other operating expenses? Transportation, energy, internet, phone, etc. The other piece of the budget is capital--used for buildings, equipment over a certain threshold or life expectancy. In most states there are very strict rules and amounts of money provided for both operating budgets and capital budgets. You can't co-mingle money between the two buckets--you can't pay teachers out of capital funds for instance.
So a $2M capital purchase that saves $2M in operating expenses directly impacts a district's ability to put teachers in the classroom. Then the HVAC system is a fixed asset, depreciated over the life expectancy of the building or buildings it serves and the financial impact on the budget is lessened.
As a taxpayer you may not care about this mundane detail and only want to scream about the expense. A more proper response is to scream to your state legislature about this arcane set of rules that forces school districts to make decisions like this.
Of course we torture people, we need the information --Gen. Pinochet
"Yeah, you're just going to have to sit in the sweltering heat during summer school until ThunderfuckThor69 sends us the PSU we need for a 30 year old computer made by a company very few of you have ever heard of."
Yeah, that'd go over well with me as a kid. Or my parents.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
You are correct. HVAC is ridiculously expensive. Unlike the computer marketplace, there are a very limited supply of HVAC solutions, and many (not all) of the vendors like to keep their circuit and programming technology proprietary.
We just bid out the controller circuits for our school's HVAC system this year in our school district. We have two buildings joined by a hallway on a common campus; 38 blowers and over a hundred dampers control air flow into each room in the building, and each needs a control circuit. Estimated cost was $150,000. Mind you, this cost is -strictly- for control circuits and software to manage them. (Our elementary building had HVAC equipment that was only 10 years old, and 23 years old in the high school. The equipment works fine, but when the circuits were upgraded with the construction of the elementary school in 2005, the contractor used an HVAC control solution that was already outdated. We could only find one vendor in the whole state that was able to service the system.)
For 19 buildings, $2 million is certainly reasonable.
o one referred to "Personal Computer" at the time with uppercase letters except when it was part of the computer's name (upper case makes it a proper noun). As an acronym, I don't recall "PC" ever being used to describe the generic class of microcomputers.
I don't know where you lived, but we used "PC" that way consistently. No one had a IBM PC in high school: our PCs were C64s, Amigas, Ataris, and the one lucky guy who could afford a Mac. We never needed a word for "IBM PC clone" as non of us had one.
Maybe it's regional, like the whole "what kind of coke would you like" thing.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
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.
NOT a C64. Its an Amiga 2000.
Commodore never used the PC acronym in its marketing or branding.
Yes, they did. For their IBM PC clones, for the C128 in some markets, and for the Amiga. Your theory that "PC" referred exclusively to IBM PC compatibles is not true. It did eventually come to mean that, but in the 1980's it simply meant "personal computer".
That reminds me of:
http://www.ee.ryerson.ca/~elf/...
They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom
Been there, done that. You're invisible if your stuff doesn't break. Nobody even knows your name. Tell someone what you did and they only see that you worked on outdated technology with no relevance to current systems.
Had someone accidentally spill a glass bottle (the real ones, not the minis today) of sprite directly into the vents at the top of my C64 at a party while it was on.
It was fine, they just kept playing the game they had loaded.
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.
Replace it with a Raspberry Pi 2, running Amiga emulation. https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
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
Did the sprites render faster after that?
emt 377 emt 4
"Yeah, you're just going to have to sit in the sweltering heat during summer school until ThunderfuckThor69 sends us the PSU we need for a 30 year old computer made by a company very few of you have ever heard of."
Uhm, or if the administration has a half a brain between all of them, they order a set (or two, or three) of replacement parts BEFORE they fail.
I have 3 replacement Palm Tungsten Cs sitting, waiting for my primary to die. I'm not stupid enough to wait for something I rely on so heavily, that's THAT old, without having backups sitting around.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
Been there, done that. You're invisible if your stuff doesn't break. Nobody even knows your name. Tell someone what you did and they only see that you worked on outdated technology with no relevance to current systems.
This is why it's so critical to include scheduled malfunctions in your control logic. That way you'll get called in every 6-9 months to "fix" the system, which you'll be able to do very quickly since it is just a matter of resetting the timer for next time. You'll make a few hundred dollars each time, and everybody will recall you fondly as the indispensable genius who is the only person who knows just how to keep the system running. Just be sure to randomize the timeouts a bit so that nobody catches on ;^)
(disclaimer: I'm joking; I don't really advocate doing this)
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
When I was in school, our A/C was regulated by an electric tea kettle, that we placed underneath the thermostat in order to trick it into keeping the room at a temperature below "Shake 'n Bake"
Our HVAC ducts were lined with safe, fireproof asbestos.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
just run an emulator on a pi.
if it's serial or parallel it speaks out through, trivial to tweak it to work.
and ebay has plenty of working amigas for many years..
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Even unused, electronic components fail with age. Capacitors leak. Wires corrode. Plastics become brittle. Ceramics crack. Don't expect the same lifespan from your cold spares as you have gotten from your live device.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Which begs the question - if it still works, why replace it?
It raises the question. Begging the question means something completely different.
No. Begging the question DOES mean raising the question.
Here's the thing: words and phrases can mean different things depending on the context. "Begs the question", when followed by a question means raises the question. "Begs the question" when talking about an argument means the obscure and antiquated English mis-translation of the older Latin mis-translation of the Greek phrase.
I suggest that you give it a rest. You're fighting the same losing battle that was fought over "gay" and "hacker". You won't change the public's mind, so the best outcome you'll ever get is looking like a pompous blow-hard. So, if that's what you're after, then have at it. Otherwise, learn to shut your trap and roll with it.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Usually, the older the hardware, the better it was built. I can still turn on my old computers from the 1980's and they all boot under one second. Do I trust my old hard drives from 2000~2005? Not so much.
I don't trust anything made past ~1995. That's around the time companies realized that they didn't have to make hardware that could last for decades because upgrades would make their new shiny obsolete long before that.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
A high-school student was able to "engineer" a system that requires all of the walkie-talkies to be turned off for 15 minutes to operate. That is to say, not engineering at all because of the failure to start with defining requirements such as what other systems will be running simultaneously.