Date: Tue, 23 Apr 2013 12:19:47 -0400
Subject: [WSFA] Re: [wsfa-forum] Old Tech
From: Michael Walsh <walshmichaelj at gmail.com>
To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at keithlynch.net>
Cc: wsfa-forum at yahoogroups.com
Reply-To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at KeithLynch.net>

On Tue, Apr 23, 2013 at 12:05 PM, Mike B. <yahoo at omniphile.com> wrote:
> 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.

FWIW:
"Benj Edwards is a freelance writer who specializes in computer and
video game history. He is also Editor-in-Chief of Vintage Computing
and Gaming, a blog devoted to vintage technology."

>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 outdated version of our software.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!!).

Oddly enough the responses to the article have lots of similar "I remember ..."

> You won't find any of these systems at the local Best Buy or
> Micro-Center,

I'm shocked, just shocked ...

>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.

mjw