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Vintage computers that are still in (indespensible) daily use

Chuckster_in_Jax said:
Actually, that is an easy one to get by.

The bigger question is:
If this piece of equipment fails, how will that impact our production. Especially if the manufacturer no longer supports the equipment and parts are rare or unavailable.
Will it cause our production line to go down? How much profit would we lose? If we can't deliver our products on time, will we lose customers?

I was in a position a few years ago where one of my duties was to repair electronic instrumentation for a lab in chemical manufacturing. Down time was critical so we didn't have the luxury of waiting days to find parts or paying outrageous prices for used parts(anybody ever seen overpriced parts?). Those questions I listed above were always the deciding factor in upgrading to newer equipment.
An obsolete computer that could be replaced at a cost of say $10,000 could easily result in $100,000 or more in lost revenue if it failed.
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In a lot of cases, where old gear (say, a controller on a CNC spinning lathe or EDM rig), upgrading to state-of-the-art computer is a 6-7 figure job. I know a fellow who makes a decent living keeping a multibus controller for a CNC drill rig made in 1979 going. And retooling for the new gear can be fabulously expensive.

Back in the 1960s, the USAF was doing their logistics on IBM 7080s, programmed in 7080 COBOL with some autocoder. In the 70's they spent about $800 million upgrading their system. It wasn't as stable and just plain didn't work. They dropped back to S/370s emulating 7080s.

There are similar horror stories about upgrading many state DMVs; California is legend.

The problem usually is that with the hardware upgrade, a software upgrade is almost mandatory. Either the old code doesn't accommodate various new hardware features or the original provider of the software has gone bye-bye and taken the source with him.

If I had a piece of gear that my operation depended upon, I'd stock plenty of spares. Heck, with my small server here, I've got two duplicates, all set up and ready to plug in should one fail. It'd take about 10 minutes to be back up and running.

One thing about older gear is that the fabrication technology wasn't as demanding. Densities were lower; in older gear, lead-bearing solder was used, so vibration tolerance and immunity to tin whiskers is much better.

So, does anyone know what's used in US nuclear power plants for control hardware? Back in the late 70's, it still was paper tape and core memory.
 
United airline AKA worldwide flight services, here at seatac airport in in seattle/tacoma is still packing 386's and dos 6.22 and windows 3.11. Their IT guy has my phone number....... he knows how hard it is to find parts on the cheapness
 
Druid6900 said:
If Three Mile Island was any indication, Commodore 64s and Atari 800s :)
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Not quite, but that does remind me that in the late 1990s, a major New York City talk radio station was still using an Atari 800 in the studio, using the built-in "Memo Pad" as a way for the show's board operator to let the host know which callers were on the line.
 
When I was waiting for a flight at EWR, someone remarked that they were "still using dot matrix printers" to print out flight info at the gates, of which I replied "because they still work just fine for the job." I must of cursed it because about a minute later, the printer jammed!

Speaking of aviation, is air traffic control still using equipment from the 1970s? The FAA is known to be very conservative about getting equipment flight certified, so thats one area where old tech rules.
 
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