Date: Tue, 23 Apr 2013 19:02:07 -0400
From: mark <whitroth at 5-cent.us>
To: wsfa-forum at yahoogroups.com
CC: WSFA members <WSFAlist at KeithLynch.net>
Subject: [WSFA] Re: [wsfa-forum] Old Tech
Reply-To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at KeithLynch.net>

On 04/23/13 12:05, Mike B. 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_anc=
ient_computers_in_use_today.html
>
> Much of the tech world knows more about tech than the guy who wrote tha=
t
> 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 outdated version of our software.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.=

Yup. We've got a machine in another Institute like that. The admin who
works with us, and them, tells me they *have* to run OS9, *not* OS X, on =

their Mac; for new hardware, it's another $5M or $10M out of the NIH's
federal budget.
>
> 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 equipmen=
t
> due to the changes in technology.  The upgrades took many years and cos=
t
> 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.=

Oh, yes: the machines that the Air Traffic Controllers' Union went on
strike in '81 to get upgraded, and Reagan fired them, just to break the
union... and it would have cost less to do it ten years earlier than
they did.....
>
> 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 b=
e
> 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 ha=
s
> 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!!).

All the systems that go to orbit and beyond are one to two generations
behind... because they're *far* less sensitive to radiation, like solar
and cosmic.
>
> 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.

Absolute agreement on all this, MikeB.

mark

--
    The government accordingly spends more and more of our tax money
financing "faith-based organizations." Without faith we might relapse
into scientific or rational thinking, which leads by a slippery slope
toward constitutional democracy. - Guns & Dope Party, California recall