Quote:
Originally Posted by Argus25
Now things get life cycled at a software level, like a print counter IC in a printer, that disables the unit when its reached a max count. This guarantees obsolescence.
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It has ever been thus. In the mid 80's I worked for a company who had invested about 15 years before in a Honywell computer (a big beast) whose main task was to invoice customers. We invoiced monthly.
Now this old machine was so ancient in today's terms that it worked in octal.
What no-one realised was that when the invoice counter got to 77777 (32767 in decimal) that was the end of the road. So when we tried to print invoice number 32768 the machine just gave an error message saying that its counter was full.
Panic! No invoices, no revenues, run out of money, dead company. Honeywell (once they finally arrived) took several days to resurrect the machine; it was so old that there were very few who knew how it worked at the level of re-zeroing the counter. And charged us a small fortune to do so.
Craig