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Vintage Computers Any vintage computer systems, calculators, video games etc., but with an emphasis on 1980s and earlier equipment.

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Old 5th Aug 2021, 5:35 pm   #1
electronicskip
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Default Government and Vintage computers

Looks like we are not the only ones keeping vintage computers alive according to this BBC Report.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-58085316
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Old 5th Aug 2021, 5:44 pm   #2
paulsherwin
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Default Re: Government and Vintage computers

Very old mainframe based systems written in languages like Cobol are surprisingly common, and not only in government, though the hardware has usually been updated and the terminals will have been replaced with PCs running terminal emulators. It's difficult and expensive to replace these systems, so the job just keeps getting deferred.

The public sector also has very little in-house development expertise of its own now, unlike the 70s and 80s when most of these bespoke systems were designed.
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Old 5th Aug 2021, 6:26 pm   #3
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Default Re: Government and Vintage computers

Not so long ago, a visit to our local hospital and the home screen was XP! Despite me having upgraded a while earlier. I was quite proud at first, the fact I was ahead of them having had my Windows 7 for a few years. Then, I wondered about the security implications of our local nhs!
Someone I know assured me the NHS and other such Government organisations were having "special" microsoft updates, but at a very inflated cost!
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Old 5th Aug 2021, 6:27 pm   #4
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Default Re: Government and Vintage computers

It's not just public sector. Large private sector companies often have legacy systems and the parts of the companies that use them have no idea how to move forward. That sometimes comes about because the users of such systems are just that, users of systems, and don't recognise that things are moving on. The IT departments are often completely unaware of these systems, and of course the users are unaware of the need to make sure the IT people are aware, and planning support or replacement.

I've experienced it in a way. We used an interface, that was PCMCIA for a couple of applications so two slots was a requirement. IT changed to a standard supply laptop with one, and then soon zero slots. There were a few workarounds for a while (keeping old tech, buying out of spec machines) all of which caused problems, but had to be done to keep us working. Eventually the suppliers of the applications switched to USB devices, but there must have been five years where we had this problem.

On the other hand it did mean that some really old tech survived. To temporarily support some applications, I managed to keep an old Toshiba laptop going, and even have it now way after I no longer needed it. It's a 1995 machine, and it will still boot to Win95. It's currently on display in a museum!
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Old 5th Aug 2021, 6:34 pm   #5
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Default Re: Government and Vintage computers

These days, quite a bit of 'legacy' software [written in Cobol, PL/1 etc] is run by way of software-emulation rather than still on the hardware it was originally designed-for.

Companies like Micro Focus IBM and Oracle are well known for 'application rehosting' - where your legacy stuff gets virtualised and run in a 'container' on modern platforms. A 42U rack-full of modern Linux servers and fast disks, running something like Kubernetes to manage deployment, is one hell of a fast platform compared with a 1980s ICL2900 or IBM4300 mainframe, so the overhead of any instruction-set-emulation isn't really that great.

Often the biggest issue is _finding_ the original system-specification/design documents and source-code!
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Old 5th Aug 2021, 6:48 pm   #6
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Default Re: Government and Vintage computers

The Police National Computer is basically a 1970s mainframe system with a few additional systems bolted on the side. It was due to be replaced a couple of years ago, but as usually happens with government IT projects the timescales slipped.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_National_Computer
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Old 5th Aug 2021, 7:16 pm   #7
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Default Re: Government and Vintage computers

Talking about running legacy software by way of software emulation, I remember back in the 1980s our IBM 370 clones running emulations of an earlier operating system called DOS (not the Microsoft one!). These were running happily, troubling no one, until we installed a file security system and discovered some really whacky file names being used by these systems that simply didn't fit into the file-naming conventions upon which the security was based - if I recall correctly, these names weren't accepted as valid names when we tried to set up rules to cover them. In the end I think we had to tell the security software that these job names were allowed access to ANY file (i.e. bypassing the security system for them). This is probably the sort of thing that leads to data going astray (apart from people leaving data devices at bus stops). At least in those days we had no internet connections as a way in for hackers.
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Old 5th Aug 2021, 7:42 pm   #8
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Default Re: Government and Vintage computers

I'm still supporting a Windows Server 2000 system which is running software which went out of support years ago.

For the last 5 years it has been run as a virtual machine, and the next big job is to replace the clients ( a mixture of Win XP and Win 2K ) with more VMs and thin clients.

The reason for keeping this old system running is not the cost of replacement, the company has a huge budget and could buy a new system overnight.

Unfortunately to validate a new replacement, the whole site would have to shut down, as the the system supplies the raw material for all of the company's products, and that just can't be allowed to happen.

So not all old systems are are kept running through ignorance, some just can't be replaced !.
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Old 5th Aug 2021, 8:07 pm   #9
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Default Re: Government and Vintage computers

I used to be responsible for a large laser hardware system in a government lab. Its controls and diagnostics were run on 1990s PCs. Broadly speaking we did everything we could to isolate it from being 'updated' or 'upgraded'. If no-one (particularly Microsoft) messed about with it then it continued to work (hardly surprising, really). If/when they did then, depressingly often, they broke it. I was convinced that much of the software 'maintenance' and 'upgrading' was put in place by people who needed to justify their existence.

If it ain't broke ...

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Old 5th Aug 2021, 8:18 pm   #10
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Default Re: Government and Vintage computers

I have in my workshop at work, among other things, a Windows XP computer and a windows 98 / DOS computer. The main reason for this is that we offer extremely long term support for our products, many of which were microprocessor or microcontroller based with a scattering of PLDs, but the hardware used to programme them was not supported beyond DOS / Windows 98 and in many cases XP.

Since the products still supported by us are themselves obsolete, there is no incentive to update everything to current equivalents. As long as these old machines continue to work we will continue to offer firmware updates, etc, for the old products, but if they ever die, that's it.
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Old 5th Aug 2021, 9:57 pm   #11
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Default Re: Government and Vintage computers

... and yet some of us would give a limb to get hold of a decent ISA-based motherboard with 386 processor!
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Old 5th Aug 2021, 10:22 pm   #12
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Default Re: Government and Vintage computers

Earlier in the year I had a temporary job on a data migration project for a company who had taken over the Co-op Insurance underwriting & had ported the data from a mainframe.

As the new database software had a lot more error checking features the team I was on had to correct all of these.

It was thought it would take 2 months to do this, but in the end we managed it in 6 weeks!
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Old 5th Aug 2021, 11:04 pm   #13
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Default Re: Government and Vintage computers

Over the last couple of years, the NZ IRD have upgraded their systems. It's the second upgrade in my career dealing with them in accounting and business. The first (no pun intended) was this one https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hYrjX7zf8g8 when I was a second year trainee at Ernst & Young.

When the IRD announced this there was all kind of concern over the cost - but in reality a billion or two after almost 30 years isn't bad!
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Old 7th Aug 2021, 9:05 am   #14
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Default Re: Government and Vintage computers

The Y2K scare in 1999 prompted many systems to be upgraded/replaced in the event of a meltdown, but of course in the large majority of cases it simply didn't happen.
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Old 7th Aug 2021, 9:19 am   #15
SiriusHardware
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Default Re: Government and Vintage computers

That's a little unfair, it mostly didn't happen because the potential for problems was anticipated, well telegraphed and steps were taken in advance to mitigate any problems. I have no doubt that the 'Y2K threat' was also used as a way of selling new equipment which wasn't actually needed, however.

I have an item of electronic equipment which acquires the time off-air and shows the time of day accurate to the second, but consistently shows the date one day out due to a firmware problem. The manufacturer just didn't anticipate the equipment, which is 20 years old, still being in use today. Luckily it's a not a mission-critical system, but if it was...

Last edited by SiriusHardware; 7th Aug 2021 at 9:34 am.
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Old 7th Aug 2021, 9:34 am   #16
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Default Re: Government and Vintage computers

The Y2K issues were certainly real, and a lot of work was done on old systems to keep them working. An awful lot of systems had been written using two digit years which would break when they rolled over to 00. A fair amount of bodging was done, as senior management wanted quick fixes which didn't cost too much.

IT management certainly used the Y2K panic to buy lots of shiny new kit.
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Old 7th Aug 2021, 10:02 am   #17
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Default Re: Government and Vintage computers

Quote:
Originally Posted by paulsherwin View Post
An awful lot of systems had been written using two digit years which would break when they rolled over to 00.
Of course, the use of two digits to denote the year is far wider than programs being written to save two digits of precious storage. How many people, even today, refer to the year by just the last two digits?
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Old 7th Aug 2021, 11:56 am   #18
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Default Re: Government and Vintage computers

I did hear while the Y2K problem was being sorted out some other coding abnormalities were sorted out.

I heard one bank system was still using Pounds Shillings & Pence for calculating then converting the result to a decimal figure!

Ironically some accountants used to use base 1000 for manually calculating £sd amounts, & just converted the total back.
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Old 7th Aug 2021, 2:18 pm   #19
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Default Re: Government and Vintage computers

Funnily enough, while sorting out some old books yesterday, I dipped into a 1904 school arithmetic book and noticed it included exercises on the decimalisation of LSD money, based on thousandths. Exact conversion was possible down to sixpence, and for smaller amounts the rule was, for sums less than 3d, multiply the number of farthings by £0.001, and for 3d to under 6d, multiply the number of farthings plus 1 by £0.001. There was a serious proposal to decimalise the pound in Victorian times, subdivided into thousandths, which is why the florin was introduced (originally marked "One tenth of a pound"), minting of half-crowns being suspended. The proposal came to nothing, the half-crown was restored, but the florin was retained, which is why we used to have two coins with such close values.

I understand that the smallest LSD sterling denomination the LEO III computer handled was the penny.

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Old 7th Aug 2021, 10:37 pm   #20
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Default Re: Government and Vintage computers

I know the florin was introduced for a possible decimalisation.

Some Commonwealth countries decimalised with a base 1000 system, but usually with 10 Mils to a Cent, then 100 Cents to a Pound.
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