Solvable by VMs and the right kind of USB-to-<thing> connectors? I read in HN last year of German tank dependencies on floppies being bypassed by USB stick replacements with the right kind of interface glue.
A friend exploring the joys of S100 bus computing said there are ways to re-purpose Rasberry Pi GPIO pins to emulate a few old bus technologies.
The airline industry are past masters at mothering old tech in, all those dot matrix printers at the gate have to be driven somehow, the old IBM mainframe links which drove them are being emulated by tn3270 style attachment boxes which can be driven over TCP/IP. (or something)
brudgers · 11m ago
Solvable by VMs and the right kind of USB-to-<thing> connectors?
If you need any kind of specific hardware other than a 3.5" floppy drive, an ordinary VM probably won't work easily, if it can be gotten to work at all.
Even with something as simple and ubiquitous as a parallel port, buying an old computer is probably going to be simpler and more reliable.
With Windows, it's not as simple as emulating an S100 bus. Windows 95 had about fifteen million lines of code. That's before you add in whatever kludged, cowboyed, and cobbled together code your hardware and application actually need.
Basically, every old windows hardware driver is a corner case and everything had a hardware driver. Often one ported from MS-DOS.
M95D · 5h ago
The Beckman-Coulter HmX hematology analyzer uses an non-PnP ISA card and MS-DOS software. The connection between the analyzer and the card is a cable as thick as my thumb and a connector larger than a Centronix.
The software communicates with the card by directly reading and writing to I/O addresses of the card. No modern OS or virtualization would ever allow that. It's why you can't have sound in old MS-DOS games unless you boot DOS or Win9x, or emulate the complete system.
LiKao · 5h ago
In several areas DOS is still used for stuff that requires no other tasks run simultaneously. This can be used to achieve some kind of near realtime capabilities.
E.g. eyetrackers used in psychology studies or tests often still require DOS, because the companies providing these systems don't want to build software that has the same timing capabilities in a newer operating system.
dsign · 8h ago
If it works, it works. Plus, probably hackers are not that interested anymore, or the Javascript engine (remember the one in IE5?) does not support the latest exploits. It's kind of cool.
cadamsdotcom · 7h ago
Old software that works isn't always bad.
Its flaws are known - since a replacement might be worse, it's often the lesser evil.
A friend exploring the joys of S100 bus computing said there are ways to re-purpose Rasberry Pi GPIO pins to emulate a few old bus technologies.
The airline industry are past masters at mothering old tech in, all those dot matrix printers at the gate have to be driven somehow, the old IBM mainframe links which drove them are being emulated by tn3270 style attachment boxes which can be driven over TCP/IP. (or something)
If you need any kind of specific hardware other than a 3.5" floppy drive, an ordinary VM probably won't work easily, if it can be gotten to work at all.
Even with something as simple and ubiquitous as a parallel port, buying an old computer is probably going to be simpler and more reliable.
With Windows, it's not as simple as emulating an S100 bus. Windows 95 had about fifteen million lines of code. That's before you add in whatever kludged, cowboyed, and cobbled together code your hardware and application actually need.
Basically, every old windows hardware driver is a corner case and everything had a hardware driver. Often one ported from MS-DOS.
The software communicates with the card by directly reading and writing to I/O addresses of the card. No modern OS or virtualization would ever allow that. It's why you can't have sound in old MS-DOS games unless you boot DOS or Win9x, or emulate the complete system.
E.g. eyetrackers used in psychology studies or tests often still require DOS, because the companies providing these systems don't want to build software that has the same timing capabilities in a newer operating system.
Its flaws are known - since a replacement might be worse, it's often the lesser evil.