NASA also used Amigas - [0]<p>Gary Jones replied; "And Commodore was easy to work with back then. When we asked for documentation, they sent us a stack of documentation about four feet high. They were willing to tell us everything about their machine. Since we had to design some custom hardware to go inside, it really helped to know exactly how everything worked."<p>"It just turned out that it was a good machine. The things that make a machine good for playing games also tend to make it good for processing and displaying data, because you've got some of the same problems. You need a very efficient, very fast operating system, and the Amiga has that and very little overhead too. That's what makes it nice; we don't load down the system running the overhead; we can just process the data."<p>"Most of our customizing is hardware customizing. The Amiga operating system is flexible enough that we have to drop into assembly only once in a while to initialize some of the special boards we use, but otherwise the operating system is fine; we don't do anything unusual with it. We use it just like it is and build hardware for our interfacing requirements because we have to pull the data out of the data bus in this building, process it, and put the data back in."<p>[0] <a href="http://obligement.free.fr/articles_traduction/amiganasa_en.php" rel="nofollow noreferrer">http://obligement.free.fr/articles_traduction/amiganasa_en.p...</a>
> Hopkins said the system runs on a radio frequency that sends a signal to school buildings, which reply within a matter of seconds with the status of each building.<p>I suspect this is what would be difficult to replace. A bespoke wireless sensor monitoring and communications system, integrated into an old heating/cooling system. Modern system just would not integrate into this, without a lot of work. You would have to replace everything, probably including the actual heating/cooling systems themselves.
Related: Palm Pilot helps run the IMAX projector<p><a href="https://www.theverge.com/23801118/imax-movie-palm-pilot-oppenheimer" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.theverge.com/23801118/imax-movie-palm-pilot-oppe...</a>
Back when I studied EE, one of our class projects (industrial automation) involved working with companies out in the industry. We found a local heating companies that provided district heating, and they had this ancient PLC running some pretty central parts of the operation. By ancient, I mean early 70s or so. But the thing had just been running for forever, doing its thing.<p>No documentation, of course, so a metric ton of black-box testing to find out what did what.<p>In the end we managed to design a pretty nice interface/HMI, and a API so that it could be monitored online.
Archive link for people outside of the US: <a href="https://archive.li/1gGb7" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://archive.li/1gGb7</a><p>I wonder if they received the funding for replacing it?
You could retrofit a more modern computer in there. Probably even reverse engineer the radio system and replace it.<p>This would have been done by an enthusiastic high school student with both programming, electronics, maybe some RF knowledge too. Radio amateur? I find these stories kind of sad. Clever system built by someone talented, at a low cost -- replacement with a modern system costed in the millions. Those talented people still exist but they wouldn't get a look in with most RFPs.
Slight nitpick: the Amiga was released in 1985, so the system dates at least from 1986. Other sources say 1987, which is not the "early 1980s" as the article says.<p>However, it's still cool that it's running. I love seeing old tech that's still just running. In the early 2000s, one of my clients was running a woodcutting system off a ZX Spectrum. They wanted to replace it, but the cost to rewrite their custom software would have been so much that they ended up buying a few used Spectrums as backup.
* article referenced on the $175m bond: <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20150312145702/http://woodtv.com/2015/03/09/how-grps-plans-to-use-175-million-bond/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://web.archive.org/web/20150312145702/http://woodtv.com...</a><p>The 2015 bonds were approved: <a href="https://grps.org/reimagine/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://grps.org/reimagine/</a><p>Here are the GRPS munis, issued in early 2016 totaling about 134m: <a href="https://emma.msrb.org/IssueView/Details/ES360882" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://emma.msrb.org/IssueView/Details/ES360882</a><p>Unfortunately, no luck finding any interesting tidbits on this Commodore or whether it was replaced. Maybe theres an RFP out there?
> A new, more current system would cost between $1.5 and 2 million.<p>Man, I'll build it for $750k - will buy a few Raspberry Pis and we're good to go...
This just shows that we need a sustainable widely supported hardware platform for long-time operation. 30 years is not that long. I wonder if RISC-V could take this niche.
I think I picked up a bootleg of this at a car boot sale in the early 2000s. Couldn't get it to work with my EU boiler, but it had a great cracktro.
<a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/15ni8gu/til_that_in_2015_19_michigan_schools_heating_and/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/15ni8gu/til_...</a><p>this is happening more and more that I see something in my reddit RSS feed first, then hours later it pops up on HN<p>Another example from today <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37078047">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37078047</a><p><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/15ncz6j/til_that_mit_will_award_a_certificate_in_piracy/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/15ncz6j/til_...</a>