I've literally been that engineer, manning that computer, in that room at White Sands, for that instrument on SDO. I was the telemetry/power systems engineer for one of their launches to do underflight calibration on the EVE instrument. It was an absolute nightmare of a job.<p>The PCs were Dolch lunchbox style single board computers. I had to scrounge the one together for the mission I worked in 2013 by assembling it from a couple of others that were broken. Then I got the joy of installing DOS, to run good old TDP502.exe to handle the telemetry stream coming in. Every fifteen seconds I had to hit "Print Screen" to make the tractor feed printer attached to the machine do a print out of my screen. Kind of insane given that the ground station was making a Chapter 10 format recording of the same data, but NASA allowed no deviation from the way they had always done things.<p>Worst job I ever had.
My main workstation is a ThinkPad manufactured in 2009 (retrofitted with even older model's keyboard), and I have a stack of backup units, and shoebox of parts.<p>(It's now supplemented with a beefy GPU self-hosted server, and I can also use cloud servers.)<p>One thing you can do to keep old production computer hardware going is to stockpile your backup/parts units and individual parts <i>now</i>. Many times I've noticed how some old hardware I used to see a lot of on eBay has disappeared, or the little remaining is in much worse condition, or only available as a single example priced like a museum piece that sits on eBay for years. Some small parts seem to be available despite what I'd guess is low market demand, but entropy gets a lot of old gear (increasingly stuck in collections, discarded, worn out, etc.).
I liked Windows 3.1 so much that I used it as my main OS until 2003. The combination of Windows 3.1 and MS Office 4.0 was great. I don't think there's been a significant improvement in Word or Excel since then.<p>If pressed, I'd say that the greatest changes for general office use in the last twenty years (for me) involve multiple monitor support and touchscreens.
Public science and art academy in my country recorded a lot of interviews on DAT digital tapes, which are now in the process if being digitised. The casette reader, however, does not report error metadata via any reasonable means, so it was modified a long time ago to report errors to an external device.<p>Wires are connected directly to the PCB of the casette player so that with the help of the external device, metadata about the errors when reading can be stored. But the external device (DATerr/DATerrMON/DATerrLOG) is ancient. It's not mentioned in Google's search results, luckily there was a copy of the printed manual somewhere.<p>It talks via RS-232 to a regular office computer from the ninetees running windows 95 to an application running in DOS mode.<p>It's time to modernize the setup, as currently the win95 PC's disk already failed and had to be replaced. Luckily the program works perfectly under DosBOX, but the environment has to be tweaked a bit (NumLock must be on, or the program hangs, etc :))<p>Edit: I said windows 93 instead of (probably) 95.
The things I've done to keep my labs instrument PCs working...<p>ISA with DMA is probably the most frustrating to deal with because it's the most common. There's a host of ancient spectrophotometers and what not all needing HP's custom IEEE GPIB connection. Next most frustrating is still great, expensive equipment with a computer running Windows XP, and no upgrade path. Or the worst, an $800,000 direct electron detector purchased new from the manufacturer LAST YEAR running Windows Server 2012. This thing is 96 megapixel, 1500 fps, it NEEDS to be on the network.<p>Things were't as bad before they were digital. For instance, I was able to digitize a chart recorder for a liquid chromatography system from the early 80s with just a Raspberry Pi and Arduino. But a spectrophotometer from the early 90s? All non-compliant GPIB with no documentation. No realistic hope there.<p>With the amount of government money being forked over essentially to pay for or work around obsolescence, there should be a federal investigation.
Most scanning electron microscopes and other large appliances in my PhD lab had computers with Windows 95 or sometimes Windows 3.11 systems to control them, as they were purchased together with the systems and often had custom-made ISA cards that wouldn't run on modern hardware (at least not easily).
Old machines and OSs are also common in medicine. At the hospital/clinic where I worked, we had a total of around 300,000 devices on our network, and at one point five or so years ago, counted over 5% of them running out of support OSs, often on hardware that was a couple of decades old. We had to maintain multiple WEP wireless nets in order to connect many of them, because they did not support WPA in any form, let alone the WPA-AES we specified as the minimum standard. The oldest OS was a pre 1.0 version of Linux that ran a 25+ year old fluoroscope (a kind of X-ray device) that worked fine in its clinical setting, and would cost millions of dollars to replace, which cost the clinical department had no wish or intent to incur. The largest by count, though, were medical devices that embedded long dead Windows OSs.<p>The security implications of this mess were enormous. It's impossible to track the vulnerabilities on this old stuff, and challenging even to determine across the enterprise what is exposed to what.
I know that the process outstations in a very large oil and gas pipeline uses a bunch of absolutely pristine MicroVAX 3100s in each building to drive the SCADA systems, which themselves are made up out of VMEBus or CAMAC crates with fairly simple 1980s electronics in them.<p>I feel confident that I could keep that old stuff running well into the future, long after a more modern system was no longer repairable. The main fault with the capture cards seems to be that the input multiplexers fail, and while they can still be repaired by the manufacturer the two types of chip they use are something I keep in stock by the hundreds for building audio circuits.
1. Purchase only that hardware for which the software interface is well-documented; universities and other public resources should drive the bus, not corporations, when it comes to interoperability.
2. Stop relying upon externally-developed software to do your dirty work; eventually, some error will cost you your livelihood or reputation.
Bad capacitors -- particularly electrolytic ones -- are the biggest enemy of electronics. The early 2000s was the worst period for that. There's even a site dedicated to fixing them at badcaps.net. Other components tend to fail far less often.
I’ve worked on two different SSL boards ( G series and K series ) that had the 1980s computer that controlled automating the console. They took up a 6 foot tall rack. And of course, you had to have a dedicated room for them so you didn’t pick up the noise in the studio. In the 2010s, these computers were still worth around $15k
I remember scrapping up a bunch of PC parts in 2010 to fully load a 900Mhz Athlon machine because it still had an ISA port and I could throw an extra GPIB card in there to interface with an even-older HP spectrum analyzer. Ran whatever ubuntu was out at the time decently enough.
> For Brembs, older PCs offer another crucial feature that was lost when Microsoft replaced its text-based operating system, MS-DOS, with Windows. MS-DOS “handles data as they come in with no buffering delays”, says Brembs, who exploits this feature for his fruit-fly flight simulator. “In Windows, so many things are constantly happening in the background,” Brembs says. You might want to take measurements at intervals of precisely 50 milliseconds, but the operating system might be able to manage only an average of 50 ms, with intervals ranging from 20 to 80 ms, depending on what else it has to do.<p>This is pretty interesting, I wonder if there are special ways to get around this, or if you’d need something like an fgpa.