Windows 3.1 Glitch Causes Problems At French Airport -- Wait, 3.1? (vice.com) 406
OakDragon writes: Microsoft has tamped down the earth on XP's grave, steered Internet Explorer toward the nursing home, and is trying to convince everyone Windows 10 is a bright up-and-comer. But in the Paris airport of Orly, a system called DECOR — which helps air traffic controllers relay weather information to pilots — is running on Windows 3.1. That program suffered a glitch recently that grounded planes for some time. The airport actually runs on a variety of old systems, including Windows XP and UNIX. Maintenance is a problem. There are only three people in Paris that work on DECOR issues, and one of them is retiring soon. Hardware is also an issue. "Sometimes we have to go rummaging on eBay to replace certain parts," said Fiacre. "In any case, these machines were not designed to keep working for more than 20 years."
Virtulize? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Virtualize? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Virtualize? (Score:5, Insightful)
This coming from a guy who espouses VMs every day on a variety of systems.
Re:Virtualize? (Score:5, Funny)
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I'm not your guy, pal
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Re:Virtualize? (Score:5, Informative)
My favorite I've encountered about ATC systems is how the documentation lies. For example, how checksums are to be computed computed for a particular broad class of messages. The ARINC specs go into detail, with diagrams and everything about the computation process. But when you look at existing samples of code, they don't do this - they do this weird thing with a lookup table and uncalled-for bitshifts and the like. After spending a day or so studying the code, I finally figured out what they were trying to do - they were trying to "optimize" the algorithm in the specs. But in the process they made it deviate from what is actually supposed to be computed in about four different ways (plus, their "optimizations" don't actually save compute time, the simple math operations are faster than the lookup in the "precompute" table that they made).
So what do we do when we need to compute and check checksums? We use the wrong code, of course! It's what's "out in the wild", so who cares what the specs say we're supposed to use, it's what we have to use if we want checksums to ever to come up valid. Hopefully they'll eventually update the specs to reflect the reality.
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Please don't, he will just spam this thread some more.
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I think we need *more* APK spam. As it is, there's a lot of it and it's a big nuisance, but no one's doing anything to fix the problem.
We need to have so much APK spam that the site becomes completely unusable. That's the only way the idiotic management around here is finally going to step up and do something about the problem.
A lot of times, you have to completely burn something down before you can rebuild something better.
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http://slashdot.org/~Coren22/c... [slashdot.org]
I think he is spamming quite enough. But that could be just me.
I am doing my best to highlight the problem to Dice, we will see if they ever do anything about it. I doubt there is much that can be done to block his "Bridge" method (really a proxy...) of spamming Slashdot, but maybe if it becomes enough of a problem they will do something about it.
I'm all for watching it all burn though.
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Does the poor baby need more attention?
Is he crying because his diaper needs changing?
You are pretty sad, but keep it up, it doesn't bother me one bit, buddy.
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You do realize that there are around 10 people who mention your crap in their signatures right?
Perhaps you should read Slashdot sometime with an accoutn logged in. You already stated previously that you created an account (I think it was AlecStar) for the Carmack interview I beleive, just use it and see what we all say "behind your back" (because you not logging in is somehow our fault).
KGIII busted your mistake on AD too!
What crack are you smoking? Here is his comment, in full, including his (current) signature. Where does he say a DAMN t
Re:Virtualize? (Score:5, Insightful)
Very true I'm sure. But I also believe in "where there's a will, there's a way"
I've been in these kinds of discussions. The Cost to figure out or build such a gap-device is too-large, or equal to "just rewrite it in modern tech." So everyone waits for another 10 years while the rewrite doesn't happen. Rather than picking it apart and refactoring a bit here and there - wait for the big bang!!
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Probably needs a 20ma current loop to drive the ASR-33 Teletype.
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You're both wrong. The reason why these machines weren't virtualized a while ago is that you have to make a lot of serial/parallel/ps2 conversions for ports that are truly physical. These are the types of programs that send specific voltage down the wires and expect exactly something specific in return. Lots of times you try to get those returns right and you simply can't anticipate the various bugs that amazingly show up just a few months after you convert. The real problem? Some are nearly unsolveable. You can't even figure out what the manufacturer/programmer was trying to achieve with their hardware interface so it's best to simply leave eveything as is. Half these people don't even work in computers anymore, let alone the vendor they were at in the 80's. This coming from a guy who espouses VMs every day on a variety of systems.
Is there a compelling reason that Windows of any version is needed here? Looks like the underpinnings here are DOS. So if they get computers that have just 1MB of RAM, fired up w/ FreeDOS, that should work well and run all the apps in question, right? In fact, it would be not just possible, but actually feasible, to have a single chip computer - say a 486 at 1GHz w/ 1MB of RAM and 1GB of SSD that would be a much faster computer for the same software. Since it's FreeDOS, one needn't depend on Microsoft
Re:Virtualize? (Score:5, Insightful)
You're both wrong. The reason why these machines weren't virtualized a while ago is that you have to make a lot of serial/parallel/ps2 conversions for ports that are truly physical. These are the types of programs that send specific voltage down the wires and expect exactly something specific in return.
Ironically, you just named three ports where that's either not the case, or trivial to achieve. All PC keyboard ports are digital 5V, there are only two kinds of signaling, and nobody was using the old kind by the time Windows 3.1 came out. All PC parallel ports are digital 5V. And by definition, RS-232 is 12V, although many if not most ports will accept a 5V signal. (If you hook up any outgoing lines, though, you may well murder any 5V serial devices you hook up, if they don't have a real MAX232 in them.)
The real problem is that a lot of these PCs have ISA-bus interface cards in them, and their drivers are often crap that is pissy about timings. Even a really high-speed PC is enough to make them not work. In order to reasonably replace these devices, you have to analyze the circuit and/or connection to figure out what the original control board was doing, throw it away, and replace it with something else. These days you might reasonably replace it with any little microcontroller board, like an Arduino. They are faster than early PCs were! But first you have to figure out how. Those boards also often included a specialty power supply to drive whatever-it-was, so you've got to replace that as well.
Most of the time it's going to make more sense to throw it all away and start with a new thing. But it's not impossible, just expensive.
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They are... However you will need to make new software to interact with it.
It is a case of Organic design, where a small app to make your job easier becomes a vital infrastructure, and was never designed for future upgrades.
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Smaller cities... like Paris, apparently?
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Or emulate.
Re:Virtulize? - Emulate?!! (Score:5, Funny)
> [ Or emulate ] ....In a Browser.
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http://bellard.org/jslinux/ [bellard.org]
Done.
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https://copy.sh/v86/?profile=w... [copy.sh]
Re:Virtulize? (Score:5, Insightful)
There might be some weird ISA interface to a radio or something that you can't virtualize-
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It's management's fault to not modernize the OS and hardware. They want to save design costs not updating software/hardware, and they get away with it for 25 years or so, but then if something critical fails, this happens... the whole system is shutdown.
Re:Virtulize? (Score:5, Informative)
In 25 years, there've probably been 25 managers who have walked away with fat bonuses for keeping this department under budget. The current one will get a slap on the wrist. They're just playing the odds to get the best outcome for themselves.
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It's management's fault to not modernize the OS and hardware. They want to save design costs not updating software/hardware, and they get away with it for 25 years or so, but then if something critical fails, this happens... the whole system is shutdown.
If it lives for 25 years with minimal cost, is this really a bad strategy?
:)
When I write software now, I try to aim for it to live 10 years without any maintenance (not always realistic, just an idealistic goal).
Then I deploy it and stick my head in the sand. Most of my systems won't live for 10 years, but if something ends up doing so, is this really a bad strategy?
I think stick your head in the sand and wait 25 years for the system to crash and someone to call you could be a cost efficient strategy
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Next issue?
This thing takes weather reports and pipes them to systems on airplanes. Very likely, the airplanes are newer than this system. Heck, you could replace the system with iPads in every cockpit for the cost of a couple of repairs to a system that old.
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The problem is not likely the OS or software running on that PC. The problem is far more likely to be a specific piece of hardware on that PC that is used to communicate with some other system.
Remember Windows 3.1 did not have any native network stack. You had to buy or download a free network stack separately (Trumpet WinSock, anyone?). So any interface that came out of the PC was likely some proprietary protocol that had some "interesting" drivers that loaded before Windows 3.1 started and hooked direc
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32 bit disk access and 32 bit file access does not (Score:2)
32 bit disk access and 32 bit file access does not work that well in VM.
also this likely needs real serial parallel ports maybe even custom PCI / ISA cards. Can you do ISA pass though in VM? Will even a PCIe to ISA Bridge work with the cards out side of a VM?
Re:Virtulize? (Score:5, Insightful)
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If you want to fund the migration of a (almost assuredly large and complex) ancient system that has to deal with countless rare edge cases, be my guest, I'm sure they'll greatly appreciate your generosity.
Re:Virtulize? (Score:5, Insightful)
You have no clue of the complexity of these systems. A three-man team is sufficient to hobble them along and keep them functional, not to port them. We've had an ongoing project to port one of our systems from AIX to Linux here for much of a decade and it's still only partly done, and we have a much larger team.
ATC systems sound simple on the face of them, but they're so ridiculously full of diverse, unreliable datasources (which can conflict with each other) and edge cases that they have to deal with it's not even funny.
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Re:Virtulize? (Score:4, Insightful)
and I'm sure there are common USB-to-ATC radar adapters you can just get on Amazon.
Many times the reason you see an antiquated OS still being used is because there was some very specific software written to talk to an incredibly unique (and expensive) piece of hardware, and that software just won't work in any other configuration. Also, they just can't shut the system down for a few hours in order to fuck around with it, so there's that.
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Yes, it's called DOSBox.
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Uh, no. Unix/BSD/Linux uses the F1...F10 keys for OS functionality (virtual desktops) where DOS apps typically used them, if at all, for internal functions. WordPerfect, for example, was useless on DOSemu or DOSbox for this reason as all software actions found in GUI menus were activated with these keys, which *nix clobbers,
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Now only if there was some kind of alternative OS to UNIX/BSD/Linux that doesn't act that way with F-key scan codes...
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I was able to create Virtualbox VMs with windows 3.1, 3.11, and even DOS 3.3 (!), all with networking enabled, and I even browsed some websites with them. I mostly used this guide:
http://www.kompx.com/en/arachn... [kompx.com]
Mainframes (Score:5, Interesting)
This is why mainframe software lives on and on. It won't go out of fashion because it never was in fashion (except in the mid 60's) and there is so much mainframe code floating around that something or someone will always support it.
Re:Mainframes (Score:5, Insightful)
And, more importantly, it's also why you can't always replace those mainframe systems: because it works, and has worked for decades.
I've been on projects to replace aging mainframe stuff, some of which went back to the mid 60s or so.
You could start off trying to design a replacement, gather requirements, and design something which works on your assumptions and in the limited use cases you've seen.
And the more you delve into it, and discover all of the exceptions, corner cases, "didn't we tell you that?", sheer size of the data, all of the hairy bits, the 50 other systems which tie into that system and would also need to be replaced or updated ... you can quickly reach the point where you really can't design a system which does the same things, you can't replace all of the integration points, you can't even really map out all the logic and business rules embedded in that system.
At the end of the day I've seen at least two such projects utterly fail.
Say what you will about legacy mainframe stuff. But they work, are so closely tied into the entire business and other systems that you can't simply swap them out as easily as people think you can, and as often as not are vastly more complex than you can possibly know until it's too late.
They're old, clunky, convoluted, and utterly mission critical. And when every other computer system in the company ties into them to extract data, you quickly realize you can't possibly update all of them.
That, and you might also find that you simply can't match the performance and throughput of those damned things.
A mainframe is a big lumbering beast. But it's a big lumbering beast which has kept the company moving for decades, hasn't had much in the way of downtime, has been expanded and added onto over the years, and in many cases will cost so much damned money to replace that nobody can afford to do it.
The guys coming in thinking they can whip up something in .NET, running SQL server, and on one machine? They often have no idea of just how big of a task they're trying to take on.
Personally, I would run screaming in the opposite direction from any project trying to replace a mainframe that's been in service for a long period. Because the scope of those things, and extent to which they interact with everything else in the company can be mind-boggling.
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Hi Five there brother. I have been down that road which eventually ran right off the cliff for all the reasons you stated. We tried early on to explain, but I had a manager that confidence that we could handle everything in a timely manor. Needless to say, he is employed there anymore.
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Mainframes aren't even obsolete. IBM still sells them, fully code compatible going all the way back to 1968 when the first System/360 mainframe shipped.
Companies that use this stuff have big expensive support contracts with IBM. They don't replace it because it works. In fact it works so well that "the mainframe is down!" is seen as a HUGE DISASTER in the business process, akin to a building burning down.
It's a whole different world than the modern idea of blades in a rack running Linux. And it still works
No surprise... (Score:5, Insightful)
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When I worked at the college bookstore warehouse in the early 1990's, we had an ancient IBM XT computer with dual 5.25" drives, an amber monitor and a dot matrix printer for printing shipping labels. It did that one job exceptionally well. I wouldn't be surprised if it still working there today.
IBM XT computers were not ancient in the early 1990's.
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Well, in 1993 I bought a 486 machine.
A dual floppy IBM XT could be as old as 1983, ran an 8088 [wikipedia.org], and ran at 4.77MHz.
So, yes, by a lot of standards, an IBM XT was ancient in the early 90s. At the very least it was around 4-5 generations of CPU behind contemporary Intel offerings.
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I was still seeing VT102s in use at a Doctor's office in the Baltimore area about 5 years ago. Also last I saw in a large pharmacy near me (three years ago now?) they were still running DOS 6.22.
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Orly? (Score:3, Interesting)
Fucking hell, I'd much rather run a mission-critical system on Windows 3.1 than Windows 10. Complexity means more potential points of failure. Windows 10 is doing so much stuff all the time that it makes a horrendous option for a machine that's chugging along doing one thing predictably and reliably. As long as it's isolated from the wild, once something works, one leaves a system the fuck alone.
If employment is an issue, employ more people. If hardware is an issue, virtualise on the most stable, simple possible hypervisor.
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Lol. Not sure you did it on purpose, but the airport that suffered the bug is "Orly" indeed! :)
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Hey - if they need employees who can maintain Windows 3.11 I know that I'd go for the right price. I still keep a Win 3.11 system running just for fun (along side my Windows Me laptop)
Sacré bleu-screen! (Score:2)
Ha this is how my company makes all it's money (Score:3, Interesting)
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They could probably hold their company indefinitely just running windows XP,7 or 8
Corporations have to constantly grow, or they're considered "dying". MS isn't going to grow if they can't get customers to keep shelling out $$$ for new versions of the old software they're already using.
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No company can force another company to spend money. They can try really hard, but the fact is, "I bought and own this, and I will use it till it doesn't work anymore" is a common mindset.
The corollary to that is that no customer can force a vendor to support an old product forever. They can try really hard, but the fact is, supporting obsolete stuff just isn't worth it most of the time. And they're definitely not going to do it for free.
They can still develop new OS's there is nothing stopping that, but
20 years? (Score:5, Interesting)
That's not a long time at all. How old is our perfectly functional ordinary telephone? If computers are going to remain so maintenance intensive, the damn things will never really be any good. We have to be able to plug it in and ignore it for those 20 years, until the smoke leaks out
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Do you think consumer electronics that have seen a nominal amount of usage over 20 years will be still working? Probably not, and that includes your telephone example. I don't think there is anything special either way about computers.
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Ever seen a Model 500 telephone [wikipedia.org] or one of it's successors? Chances are that they are well over 20 years old. Some that are still in use may have been 20 years old 20 years ago.
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I am not talking about a completely analog phone- that is a ridiculous example. How about a 20 YO cell phone, or answering machine or cordless phone?
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Do you think consumer electronics that have seen a nominal amount of usage over 20 years will be still working?
It used to be normal for electronics to last for twenty years. People used to throw away stereo systems because they got dirty volume pots and they were too cheap and/or lazy to fix them. Now they throw them away because they lose an audio channel.
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We have to be able to plug it in and ignore it for those 20 years, until the smoke leaks out
We did, and it is.
It's Warped (Score:2)
I remember trying ti buy a train ticket at the Charles de Gaulle airport station after flying in, in 2005. The queues were horrendous, and then one of ticket machines crashed, and all the people in queue swore and walked away. Except for me, since I recognised that the machine was running OS/2 Warp. By having the patience to wait a couple of minutes for it to reboot, I effectively jumped the queue. It took only three tries to get the machine to accept my credit card ... I hope their systems are a bit better
So cute (Score:5, Funny)
Hardware or software? (Score:2)
TRS-80 still in use (Score:5, Insightful)
Considering I still use a TRS-80 Model 100 on a regular basis (great keyboard!), Systems using Windows 3.1 do not surprise me.
Then again, I work for a bank, login to a mainframe and review COBOL code that dates back into 1980... So, yeah. I'm not surprised.
Re:TRS-80 still in use (Score:5, Funny)
1980? Wow. You got the new stuff.
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You wouldn't happen to be the missing COBOL programmer that ExxonMobil has been trying to track down to upgrade the TANDEM system that he created in the early 80's, are you?
If so, they've spent a FORTUNE on P.I.'s looking for you! You should call them....
Learn from the railroads (Score:5, Interesting)
Demand support nearly forever. When steam was replaced here in the mid 50s to late 60s, the average age of the replaced engines were around 50 years. The replacement engines are still in operation. The main reason is safety. When designing a new locomotive, the manufactor spend a fortune verifying the performance, which is then added to the price (naturally). On delivery of the first of its kind, it goes through a whole lot of testing and documentation to ensure that it's not too heavy for the track, works with the signal system and all that stuff. It takes time and cost millions. It's a lot cheaper once the type is certified, but they are still tested with non-free tests. This makes buying a used already certified engine quite attractive and as a result, spare parts are produced for many decades after production stopped. It's a demand from the railroads and supplying those parts makes manufactors trustworthy enough to be candidates for new engines expected to be used for at least 30 years, likely more than that.
Computers are way too short lived. Powerplants/grid, railroad signals, air traffic control and so on are hard to replace systems and once they have something working, they want to stick to their systems as long as possible. They make horrible contracts since they are unable to get the spare parts they need. The US army invented VHDL to give a description of the work of a chip and you would not be able to sell to the army without VHDL code. The idea is that if the army needs a replacement chip 20 years later and the original company went out of business, they can send the VHDL code to another company and say "make this chip using housing XYZ". That will ensure they don't have to scrap helicopters or whatever because a single chip went out of production. Civilians should be equally demanding for critical systems.
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The problem is that that approach you describe with VHDL doesn't actually work. The Army has all kinds of problems sourcing obsolete parts these days. If what you described actually worked, they'd just get someone to fab the chips for them.. But they don't, they source them from all kinds of weird little suppliers of NOS components, and frequently end up getting counterfeit stuff from China.
Moreover, there's a lot more to a chip design than the HDL code. You can't just give some foundry some HDL code an
Understatement of the century. (Score:2)
"Maintenance is a problem."
No shit. Really?
I'm guessing the business justification to replace these systems has read about as benign as this understatement for decades now.
Let's hope for the city of Paris learns a lesson here when one of the three people supporting this system agrees to fix it at the rate of $500,000/hr. (2 hour minimum of course).
UNIX is old...? (Score:2)
"The airport actually runs on a variety of old systems, including Windows XP and UNIX."
Depending on what actual operating system this is, just because its UNIX doesn't mean its old.
If it was some version of SunOS UNIX, yeah I'd say its old :)
Cheapskate power 10 (Score:2)
Look I understand the desire to spare, but there are a heap of vendor which propose this exact service (I work for one !) and i doubt it is connected to anything for which tehre would not be an interface we handle already (from MATIP to other weird protocol), even going to change format for you, all on modern cheap hardware. having anything that run 3.1 when it should be easily to get for cheap such a service.... So if there is no incredibly rare hardware unknown protocol reason, then it is cheer stupidity.
Let the guy retire (Score:5, Funny)
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and lock the dinosaurs back in their cages
Well, it locks the cages...
where the dinosaurs are at that moment is an external variable.
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That's because it lacks support to the dinosaur presence detector.
It doesn't "lack support" - it's just that the vendor won't open-source a binary blob that's necessary for the dinosaur presence detector kernel extension to function.
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You jest, but you do know that 3D interface was a real thing [wikipedia.org], that SGI built, right?
If you happened to have an SGI UNIX machine which had this interface, it was real. At one point someone had gotten us an SGI box to port our software to .. so in 1996 I suddenly found myself staring at the interface going "wait, this is real?". Real, shipping software.
So, if you had a sensible filesystem layout, and a single script to restart the system, it's shockingly not nearly as far fetched as you think.
It really is
Ehh, sorry... (Score:2)
Ehh, sorry to break it to you, but not all Unix installations come with SGI's File System Navigator. So in those installations, your best bet would be to create a GUI interface using VB and track the IP.
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If it is called Unix, then chances are it is fairly darn old.
Otherwise they would be calling it Solaris, xBSD, OS X...
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If you're going to use that, at least use it correctly...UNIX means it is a full POSIX compliant Operating System, like Solaris, IRIX, or AIX. None of that nasty GNU stuff needed.
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None of that nasty GNU stuff needed.
Unless the sysadmin has a brain, in which case she installs the optional but ubiquitous GNU userland packages and places them first in execution paths. Because the UNIX native utils suck dead donkey balls.
But yes, in those true UNIX systems /usr/bin and /usr/sbin is probably pure UNIX heritage, for good or ill.
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The only GNU package I find that I really miss on other operating systems and usually build is the bash shell. POSIX tar can be a pain (it's really nice to be able to type tar xjvf or tar xzvf instead of bunzip2 -c filename | tar xf -), but otherwise there isn't too much that is required (exempting stupid packages full of GCCisms that won't compile correctly using MIPSPro or SunStudio)
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Info is nice, but for many packages it just shows the man page anyway.
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BTW: taking into account the age of the systems I can make a bet they use HP-UX since I worked on both systems 'in parallel' in the early nineties.
Really? You've been around that long, and still have not learned not to feed the trolls?
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GNU = GNU Not Unix.
GNU/Linux is not Unix
GNU systems including Linux are very Unix like. But have none of the original Bell Labs Code. It isn't a Fork of Unix, but a new product.
GNU was derived as a response to some legal and copyright issues in the early 1990's.
GNU is GPL but GPL is how they chose to license the System.
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It isn't a Fork of Unix, but a new product.
I don't dispute that GNU doesn't base on the original Bell labs Unix code, but is instead a full rewrite in order to promote FREE SOFTWARE. But all these Forks of the Unix code base, they aren't real UNIX anymore. Because why do you fork something. Do you do it in order to create the same piece of software? No, you want to do something different, chose a different path. That's what all these operating systems did you regard to as being the "real UNIX". Them chosing a different path is completely okay, its nothing wrong. Its just that BSD isn't an Unix anymore.
Now to the GNU operating system. Why did they chose to _rewrite_ unix, and not just create something entirely new? Because they wanted to create a free _implementation_ of unix that would work just like the original Bell labs unix worked, so that software could easily be ported, and improvement patches still could be shared freely over the internet, just like in the old days.
The name "GNU Is not Unix" was chosen in a joking manner, just like YACC for "Yet Another Compiler Compiler". It doesn't reflect the truth.
So, to summarize, the GNU developers did want to keep as close to unix as possible, in order to make life easier for people who want to migrate, and to provide a general-purpose base for free sharing of modifications and improvements. The forkers like the BSD team however, wanted to tailor unix for their needs, for their specific use-case. Of course the operating system becomes something different in the process.
Except that the HURD kernel (GNU's native) is radically different from any UNIX kernel, Stallman disagrees with all the unix's licenses, the GNU project doesn't endorse or even accept the legitimacy of any UNIX, and several very important GNU tools (emacs, gcc, gdb, etc) actively violate UNIX philosophy.
You've got it backwards. Stallman set out to make a completely free (well, by his definition, anyway) ecosystem of tools. He actually didn't (and probably still doesn't) like UNIX philosophy very much, th
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The SunOS kernel and the BSD kernel can be recompiled with various options pretty easily too, so that argument falls flat.
Re:I would actually bet money (Score:5, Insightful)
I have some old VB apps from the 3.1 era.
Although it may be technically possible to get them running, it's certainly not as easy as just copying the files across and running the program.
The fact that it is to do with weather suggests it interfaces with hardware of some kind or some external services. That's where you'll REALLY hit problems that just running as admin or renaming files or providing substitutes isn't going to fix.
Good luck getting a driver from the 3.1 era working on anything at all nowadays, even emulated. You would literally just be better off throwing it out, starting again and suffering the inconvenience.
I'd take that bet. (Score:3, Informative)
Primarily because I'm betting the interface from that Windows 3.1 machine has some very specific DOS "driver" (TSR for us old-timers) that even Windows 95 would kill.
There were some very interesting hacks that could be done on a DOS box. I remember writing a TSR that bumped up the system timer to allow a finer grain on the timer events. It also sent out the "normal" system event to the rest of the OS so Windows would keep running.
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Including support for some custom 8-but ISA bus cards? Good luck.
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The problem with outdated, obsolete technology is maintenance. Nothing lasts forever, and a 25-year-old PC computer is going to fail at some point. Then you're not going to be able to find working replacement components, though you might be able to get by for a while by replacing capacitors or something. But at some point you're going to have a lot of trouble finding people willing and able to work on this stuff and keep it going. And yes, the prices end up going through the roof because you have to fin