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Windows 3.1 Glitch Causes Problems At French Airport -- Wait, 3.1? (vice.com)
OakDragon writes: Microsoft has tamped down the earth on XP's grave, steered Internet Explorer toward the nursing home, and is trying to convince everyone Windows 10 is a bright up-and-comer. But in the Paris airport of Orly, a system called DECOR — which helps air traffic controllers relay weather information to pilots — is running on Windows 3.1. That program suffered a glitch recently that grounded planes for some time. The airport actually runs on a variety of old systems, including Windows XP and UNIX. Maintenance is a problem. There are only three people in Paris that work on DECOR issues, and one of them is retiring soon. Hardware is also an issue. "Sometimes we have to go rummaging on eBay to replace certain parts," said Fiacre. "In any case, these machines were not designed to keep working for more than 20 years."
This is why mainframe software lives on and on. It won't go out of fashion because it never was in fashion (except in the mid 60's) and there is so much mainframe code floating around that something or someone will always support it.
Table-ized A.I.
Fucking hell, I'd much rather run a mission-critical system on Windows 3.1 than Windows 10. Complexity means more potential points of failure. Windows 10 is doing so much stuff all the time that it makes a horrendous option for a machine that's chugging along doing one thing predictably and reliably. As long as it's isolated from the wild, once something works, one leaves a system the fuck alone.
If employment is an issue, employ more people. If hardware is an issue, virtualise on the most stable, simple possible hypervisor.
We do third party support for out of warranty shit, The fun one over here (for us anyways) is MPE, Factories still run on this stuff, everyone who supports it is dying, it's hard to train new people to deal with the old way of doing things. But there is always a need somewhere. I don't see why Microsoft doesn't spend their resources for SAS for updates on antiquated software. They could probably hold their company indefinitely just running windows XP,7 or 8. The corporate licensing could compensate for security updates on the consumer side. In the early days upgrading all the time made sense. But how many different ways do you need to edit a document, or use Excel. These things are at a point. Windows is a stable operating system. Why should companies keep shelling out for new hardware, when for most people (not designers, or other power users) a core 2 duo is more than enough power. As to virutalizing, Not likely, and more importantly, not free. Windows 3.1 is 16 bit. If you didn't need access to any hardware (old network cards or specialty cards of any kind) there would be a shot. But this is pre HAL, it relies on BIOS for control of it's hardware. Also, even if you could virtualize, you would need to know the coders to fix all the bugs from the switch over. How do you do that in a live system that was pre-virtualization without making downtime. Downtime that isn't really available for an airport. Lastly, they have a system that "works" they would have to pay the capital investment to switch. (I know they should but hey they are French)
That's not a long time at all. How old is our perfectly functional ordinary telephone? If computers are going to remain so maintenance intensive, the damn things will never really be any good. We have to be able to plug it in and ignore it for those 20 years, until the smoke leaks out
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Demand support nearly forever. When steam was replaced here in the mid 50s to late 60s, the average age of the replaced engines were around 50 years. The replacement engines are still in operation. The main reason is safety. When designing a new locomotive, the manufactor spend a fortune verifying the performance, which is then added to the price (naturally). On delivery of the first of its kind, it goes through a whole lot of testing and documentation to ensure that it's not too heavy for the track, works with the signal system and all that stuff. It takes time and cost millions. It's a lot cheaper once the type is certified, but they are still tested with non-free tests. This makes buying a used already certified engine quite attractive and as a result, spare parts are produced for many decades after production stopped. It's a demand from the railroads and supplying those parts makes manufactors trustworthy enough to be candidates for new engines expected to be used for at least 30 years, likely more than that.
Computers are way too short lived. Powerplants/grid, railroad signals, air traffic control and so on are hard to replace systems and once they have something working, they want to stick to their systems as long as possible. They make horrible contracts since they are unable to get the spare parts they need. The US army invented VHDL to give a description of the work of a chip and you would not be able to sell to the army without VHDL code. The idea is that if the army needs a replacement chip 20 years later and the original company went out of business, they can send the VHDL code to another company and say "make this chip using housing XYZ". That will ensure they don't have to scrap helicopters or whatever because a single chip went out of production. Civilians should be equally demanding for critical systems.