My dad was a telecommunications engineer from before I was born until he retired last year. I don't remember any specific examples, but I do recall several times in my life when he complained about work because of having to do complete overhauls on systems because of something not being supported anymore. Sometimes he had to take business trips to do this at facilities in other states.
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in reply to @sinpyro's post:
It should go even further. I think it should be legally required that as soon as software is no longer supported (whether it's a game, firmware, system tool, etc.), it should be re-licensed to be copyleft and open-sourced. That would not only be great for preserving that history, but also allow it a new future.
Need a program from the 90s that isn't supported anymore? It may take a bit of work, but with the source code available, it could be updated to work on modern systems. Want to play a retro game? You could emulate it, sure, or you could see if there's a community maintained port for your modern platform of choice.
I had no idea research labs had this issue, this is only going to make me more insufferable about this issue.
absolutely!!!
up until at least the mid 2000s, the National Weather Service forecast office in Miami would launch weather balloons with a radiosonde attached. The only receive-and-store-data frobozz available for the radiosondes they used ran on an IBM XT. The data was sneakernetted across the room on a floppy.
Yeah, most Big Microscope units in research labs (i.e. any facility called a "Microscopy Core" somewhere in a 3rd basement) are air-gapped. They require labtechs to bring fresh in-packaging flash drives to get the images off of them (a fresh one, every single time) to make sure the Windows Far-Too-Old system from touching anything on the modern internet it has no protection from.
in reply to @the-coool-gay57's post:
It seems like there's a new tidbit of radicalizing information every day now. I didn't even think this was a thing, but now I know and I'm angry about it.