WHOA! Microsoft strikes again...

Select quantity and payment method, enter shipping address, done.

Wow, that's more than a PC costs and you still have to buy everything else. Glad I tossed my parallel port crap long ago.

There are situations when you can't. Such as legacy production gear or software that has no replacement. $288 is chump change compared to scrapping a half million Dollar production machine. Serious stuff. As for software, I had situations where I needed to use 80's era software. A new release wasn't ever going to happen because some of the authors were no longer among us earthlings. Other times research teams had disbanded which meant that the chance for an updated version was zero.

It's not cheap.

I don't use parallel ports any more but it's nice to know they're still there.

I worked for a Fortune 500 company where every contract bid went through a data entry session with a woman running an ancient DOS program to finalize the thing. People lined up like at the DMV.

Only the code lives forever*.

The idea that a half million dollar machine would have to be scrapped is absurd.

It is not. If we hadn't been able to obtain such legacy-supporting hardware a large semiconductor test system would have had to be scrapped. That was the point.

Vendors know that and, therefore, obtaining legacy-supporting hardware is quite easy. As Les has evidenced.

When we replaced the ancient PC in semiconductor test system it cost more than $500. That is very small change versus having to scrap the whole enchilada, buying a new system that costs as much as a Rolls Royce and enduring weeks of line stop in production.

No, it is bull. A machine worth half a million would justify using a modern computer for the purpose even if it required rewriting some software. If nothing else a custom dongle could be made and a driver written to do what was needed.

You seem to know nothing about products with production runs in excess of a decade.

It can not. Machine is down, sales managers are hollering, the CEO becomes nervous, you have precious few days or sometimes just hours to fix this. Writing new code for something where you can't get the SW documentation and where you can't reverse-engineer anything because it's dead in the water? Phhhht ...

I've had one case where the SW engineer was long gone but because of sheer luck we found him. We also found the storage media. Minor problem: It was on 8" floppies. That was solvable. Without the SW engineer? Not a chance. The only reason we could solve this was because it was a custom solution design by the client and not by an outside company.

On Sat, 14 May 2016 10:54:36 -0400, rickman Gave us:

Use one of these quarter million dollar devices in it.

Buying ancient hardware does sound cheaper than rewriting the code, after all :)

Michael

It's also a lot faster. I was very surprised myself how fast. Ordered the system, spooled the old software on there, connected it and all was as if nothing ever happened. Except that the client now had a CD drive while the old machine only had floppies and a network connection.

This is really not the case. Large expensive things are much more likely to last across decades. Outside of pure consumer goods, there are probably more of those than computers likely to have the lifespan of an iPhone.

The upgrade treadmill is consumerist planned obsolescence on steroids. There is nothing normal about it.

It's less about cheap than about risk.

It's certainly not normal and it doesn't work with consumers like me:

Still in use and in good repair. It has survived my grandpa and I am quite certain it will survive me. Oh, and it has also survived World War II, brought it over from Europe.

$288? Too expensive. Same thing for $30.

Where's the parallel port? ;)

On that note, once you secure one, maybe buy a couple of spares just in case... with the correct RAM and CPU as well...

Michael