Posted on 02/20/2012 7:27:49 AM PST by ShadowAce
Its easy to wax nostalgic about old technology--to remember fondly our first Apple IIe or marvel at the old mainframes that ran on punched cards. But no one in their right mind would use those outdated, underpowered dinosaurs to run a contemporary business, let alone a modern weapons system, right?
Wrong!
While much of the tech world views a two-year-old smartphone as hopelessly obsolete, large swaths of our transportation and military infrastructure, some modern businesses, and even a few computer programmers rely daily on technology that hasnt been updated for decades.
If youve recently bought a MetroCard for the New York City Subway or taken money from certain older ATMs, for instance, your transaction was made possible by IBMs OS/2, an operating system that debuted 25 years ago and faded out soon after.
A recent federal review found that the U.S. Secret Service uses a mainframe computer system from the 1980s. That system apparently works only 60 percent of the time. Heres hoping that uptime statistics are better for the ancient minicomputers used by the U.S. Department of Defense for the Minuteman Intercontinental Ballistic Missile system, Navy submarines, fighter jets, and other weapons programs. Those systems, according to the consultants who help keep them going, will likely be used until at least the middle of this century.
Here are a few stories of the computers that time forgot, and the people and institutions that stubbornly hold on to them.
Sparkler Filters of Conroe, Texas, prides itself on being a leader in the world of chemical process filtration. If you buy an automatic nutsche filter from them, though, theyll enter your transaction on a computer that dates from 1948.
Sparkler Filters' IBM 402,
(Excerpt) Read more at pcworld.com ...
This is not new. During my quest for a BS in Computer Science we had to write and run programs in COBOL, Fortran, MIX, Algol, GPSS, Simula, SNOBOL, LISP, and probably a couple others I've forgotten.
During my first USAF assignment I was working with a Captain with a MS in Comp Sci.
Around 1976 we had a new 2nd Lieutenant join the group; had a BS in Comp Sci but had never "run" a program. In her curriculum you wrote the COBOL program out on paper and the instructor graded the source code.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AmigaOS
AmigaOS is the default native operating system of the Amiga personal computer. It was developed first by Commodore International, and initially introduced in 1985 with the Amiga 1000. Old versions only run on the Motorola 68k series of 16-bit and 32-bit microprocessors, while the newer AmigaOS 4 runs only on PowerPC
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The current holder of the Amiga intellectual properties is Amiga Inc. In 2001 they contracted AmigaOS 4 development to Hyperion Entertainment and in 2009 they granted Hyperion an exclusive, perpetual, worldwide right to AmigaOS 3.1 in order to develop and market AmigaOS 4 and subsequent versions.[1]
Also, Amiga kudos. A machine WAY ahead of it's time. For better or worse, Alex St. John, one of the fellows who was behind the design of DirectX was influenced by the Amiga OS architecture.
Ah yes, I remember. I stepped up to the 1130 and the 1620 after that. I think there was some PDP4 time in there too.
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