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.<p>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.<p>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 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.
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.<p>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.
If blocked from the internet I see no issues. IMO, every old Windows System needs to attach to their own "personal" router that has a robust firewall. or maybe a "PI" type board acting as a router.<p>But from what I have seen, the largest abusers are in the Medical Industry. For example, hospital's IT are far from a priority and its only purpose is to keep things running, not security. Add to that Medical Software is insanely expensive, making companies like SAP and Oracle jealous of what these companies can get away with.<p>And you have the fear factor in medical, if an upgrade fails, someone could die. Thus releasing the Lawyers.
I immediately thought of the NYC MetroCard machines running Windows 2000 and a bunch of indy grocery stores running pirated versions of Windows XP before reading this.