Date: Tue, 23 Apr 2013 12:05:59 -0400
From: "Mike B." <yahoo at omniphile.com>
To: wsfa-forum at yahoogroups.com, WSFA members <WSFAlist at KeithLynch.net>
Subject: [WSFA] Re: [wsfa-forum] Old Tech
Reply-To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at KeithLynch.net>

On 4/23/2013 11:03 AM, Michael Walsh wrote:

> 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 hasn=92t been updated for
> decades."
>
> http://www.pcworld.com/article/249951/if_it_aint_broke_dont_fix_it_anci=
ent_computers_in_use_today.html

Much of the tech world knows more about tech than the guy who wrote that =

article.  And economics.

When I worked for The Wollongong Group/Attachmate doing TCP/IP stacks
for the OpenVMS OS, we had a customer who came to us for a patch for an
outdated version of our software.  It was for a version of OpenVMS that
had come out 15 years earlier.  They could not upgrade to the current
release because the VAX that was running it was part of a CAT scanner,
and if they changed to a new OS version they'd have to re-certify all
the machines they'd ever made that got upgraded.  FDA rules apparently.

I believe that the FAA has upgraded most, if not all, of the computers
used to run air traffic control in the USA, but until at least the late
1990s they were running on 1960's technology.  As they upgraded they
were replacing room-sized equipment bays with a single rack of equipment =

due to the changes in technology.  The upgrades took many years and cost =

millions of dollars due to the need to make sure that the new stuff was
at least as reliable as the old stuff, and did at least as many things.

When I was working on Navy contracts in the early 1980s I worked on an
AN/UYK-20 computer, which is used in ships for things like signal
processing (i.e. radar and sonar and targeting).  It's a 2' cube that
weighs about 200 lbs.  It has 64K (yes, KILObytes) of RAM...which is
done with magnetic core memory...which has the advantage over CMOS
memory in that it doesn't get wiped by a power failure...i.e. you can be =

back online as soon as power is up again, without a reboot).  It has an
instruction set optimized for what it does...it's the only system I've
ever seen that has a machine instruction for hyperbolic cosine.  It's
also fairly indestructible...I think you could drop it out a 4th floor
window without hurting it.  It's also the only system I've seen that has =

a switch on the front labeled "battle short"...this disables the
overtemp shutdown circuit (i.e. "I don't care if you are on fire!  Keep
shooting!!).

You won't find any of these systems at the local Best Buy or
Micro-Center, and none of the systems they sell will do what these
systems can do.  There's more to tech and computing than cell phones,
tablets and PCs.

-- Mike B.