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20-Yr-Old Compaq Laptop Is Still Crucial to Maintaining McLaren's Multi-Million Dollar Cars (jalopnik.com)
An anonymous reader writes: It may come as a surprise to many, but the 20-year-old Compaq LTE 5280 still plays a vital role in maintaining multi-million dollar McLaren F1s. Jalopnik recently visited McLaren's Special Operations workshop where it found several of Compaq's old laptops serving their masters. Why do they rely on these dated computers, you ask? A McLaren Special Operations staff explains, "The reason we need those specific Compaq laptops is that they run a bespoke CA card which is installed into them. The CA card is an interface between the laptop software (which is DOS based) and the car. We are currently working on a new interface which will be compatible with modern laptops as the old Compaqs are getting less and less reliable and harder to find." For those wondering, the Compaq LTE 5280 comes with a 120MHz Intel Pentium processor, up to "80MB" of RAM, and up to 1.2GB of HDD.
Yes, an old fashioned dongle that makes them require a 20-year-old laptop.
Those specs seem backwards. Perhaps it had 16MB of ram and an 80MB hard drive?
came with 8 or 16 MB of ram, expandable to 72 or 80 MB. Where the summary is wrong is that it came with an 810MB HD (or a 1.35GB HD)
Usually the main problem with stuff from that era isn't the electrical interface (if it's on x86, good chance it's ISA or ISA-timings-but-with-CMOS-levels) - it's that the software is proprietary and/or the source has been lost a decade ago, expects the adapter(s) at fixed I/O / memory ranges and on top has a bunch of timing loops that overflow on anything > a few 100 MIPS...
As an owner of a 5280 (including the insane for the time 80mb ram configuration) I know exactly how a lazy reading could lead to a 16MB "harddrive". Like most laptops of the time the 5280 didn't have a SO-DIMM like standardized slots and so the ram was soldered right on the motherboard. The biggest configuration was the 16MB model, hence "up to" 16MB. But there was a way to get more ram after purchase - a proprietary 5280 daughterboard screwed in behind the rear port cover could add additional ram (largest daughterboard had 64MB) for a total of 80MB when combined with the top range model.
Also the 1.3GB HD configuration was only at release. Larger harddrives where available later on (I've got a 2.1GB) since the HD was the only thing not proprietary to the 5280 and so it could be easily updated without engineering new parts (HD is right between the two multibays and can be exposed without tools).
There are many industrial processes and machines running ancient hardware. Also common in the medical field.
A local radio station I service (IT) finally replaced an audio editing computer last year. This computer was running Windows 95. Why? A 'bespoke' audio editing card, which required an EISA bus. So why not some other software solution? Because this software did EXACTLY what they wanted to do, was very easy to use, and very easy to train new users on. We maintained an inventory of spare parts -- including a spare motherboard -- to keep the system running.
So why did they replace it? The audio editing card (which was a dedicated computer on a daughter card) began to fail, and that's the part they didn't have a spare for. The replacement product they are using is Adobe Audition.
I know of many other industrial and medical machines that are running old versions of windows on old hardware because they have proprietary software or hardware that is not cost-effective to upgrade (and is working perfectly fine). Some of the software and hardware would be tens of thousands (in some cases hundreds of thousands) of dollars to upgrade -- just to run a more modern OS. If a return on investment cannot be identified, the hardware will not be upgraded.
Give me my freedom, and I'll take care of my own security, thank you.
DOS only ever noticed 1MB. To get more you needed a high memory manager.
If they used a DOS app, then it would have most likely used HIMIS.SYS and EMM386.EXE to access that huge 80MB pool of memory.
Or maybe it's some hideous 16 bit windows 3.1 application, who knows?
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.