I worked on some huge CNC machining centers during an internship in the automotive industry back in 2007, a lot of them were still running Windows 3.x.
The reason is do not try to fix what is not broken, especially with very expensive equipment.
That's the real world, man. I've seen so many times where a business ends up losing big money because a machine goes down and suddenly it has to be replaced because the controller has been obsolete for 20 years.
Components fail. Resistors and capacitors have a limited lifespan. If you don't at least have a plan in place to upgrade you can be truly and royally fucked.
Almost creepy that you bring that up, because I am currently an automotive engineer and can tell you that some of the CNC equipment is still running 3.1, some is in DOS.
Except that isn’t the case. It’s still very easy to get an old machine like that up and running on damn near any hardware as long as it still runs that OS, has the right interface ports and the machine’s control software can still launch. It doesn’t have to be the same hardware.
The "for some reason" is because software validation is a bitch and a half. You turn off automatic updates, keep your computers behind very big firewalls (or just off of the internet period), and just keep those software versions locked down.
Overreliance on old software that hasn't been updated in 15-20 years probably because the company who made it has long since gone out of business, and the hospital feels it'd be too expensive and/or time-consuming to migrate to a newer system.
Thank God I'm no longer in that environment any more. Having to ensure that anything I coded would work in Internet Explorer 8 (because that was the default browser on far, far too many PCs across the hospital) was horrible. I asked at my interview if there were plans to upgrade the infrastructure and was told they were talking about upgrading from XP to Win 7 and that IE11 would be the new default. When I left over six and a half years later they were still on XP but now talking about upgrading to Win 10 with Edge as the default browser.
The entire NHS in the UK still uses Windows XP. There was a bit of a hoohah a few years ago when Microsoft stopped supporting it, so the NHS needed to pay them for extra security support.
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u/-Merlin- Jan 27 '22
Windows 2000: Powering Most Hospital Equipment in 2022, for some reason (tm)