I'd like a law that software / hardware companies who file for bankruptcies must release the source / files for their tech to an open source repository.

Yup. Take backups, have spares, and keep it off the Internet and it'll work just fine.

Pro tip, you can get IDE to CF adapters if you want to put an SSD in those old machines to really see them fly. Just be aware that they don't have nearly as good write durability as a real SSD, so keep write heavy operations on the HDD.

There's still things like that on my workplace today. I think there's some older, rarely used CNC with Win98 on the controller. We just keep spares around when they break, but that's cheaper than replacing the whole machinery. Also there's some XP stations running software for an industrial machine which would cost quarter of a million to replace. Some of those need access to network drives and such but they live in a strictly isolated VLAN.

And, as far as I've told at least, there was no option at any point to upgrade just the computers on those things. It's always the whole assembly line or whatever they're connected to. There's not many companies willing to throw hundreds of thousands every 3-5 years to replace perfectly working equipment.

Right? If it still works then it still works.

If the article was talking about anything other than tech/software, we’d be praising its longevity.

Frighteningly, i worked as an admin at a hospitality wifi business that ran a windows box for dhcp duty. I would have to go o site, in the middle of the night, down to the basement of this hotel, and reboot the damn thing. It would die almost every week. Replaced with a linux server and never heard from them again.

I could tell you the stories of W95 & XP that runs the medical world...

=Let(), Lambda and Regex were good additions to Excel imo

Everything beyond the Dewey decimal system is/was pretty unnecessary, imo. We created a way to organize and "quickly" locate information stored in a physical format.

The near complete lack of manual labor has had many long reaching effects on society.

I type this on my brand new flagship phone...

It's probably only the screen component that is running an old version of embedded windows.

Qube cinema servers only got off XP in 2015. They're still on 7 though.

I mean, you can if you want to

I ran Linux 1994ish. Amiga OS before. Amstrad CPC 464 before. A friend ran Sinclair ZX-80, that was the first system I had access to.

There are many, many machines out there running 95 and even earlier versions. The issue is that a machine from 30 years ago is almost always still using the software that came with the machine… 30 years ago.

Even if the OS has received security patches, which isn’t even assured, the company may either no longer be in business, or charge for new OS drivers/specialized software.

In many cases, your options are literally to replace an entire machine worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, or deal with the networking nightmare that is “keep this on the network, but not on the network.”

BART wrote a PDP8 cross assembler in the late 90s, that they still use today.

https://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/plucky/man1/palbart.1.html

They lost me when they removed the start button on the left side of the taskbar in version 8.1 (I think it was) to... Be cool with the kids (I think 8.1 was supposed to be touch screen friendly)? I don't even know, but I went back to Windows 7 for a long while.

The backlash with the start button was so huge that they put it back on the taskbar in Windows 10 (at least mine has it and is the reason I got Windows 10). I'm currently refusing to update to Windows 11, because it apparently crashes when playing certain video games and I'm not about to have the other trash bugs that come with it, which I've been seeing posted on Microsoft help forums when I search for Windows 10 related questions. Fuck that noise, I don't want to deal with it.

and how to use is safely.

Such as by disconnecting the ethernet and power cables