this post was submitted on 18 May 2025
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At my old workplace, there was numerous XP machines still going. They were running old machine equipment, and basically served as a controller for the entire machine.
As it turns out, it was cheaper to keep these XP stations, instead of buying a completely new Hydrolic press, or whatever it was running, which cost several hundred of thousands of dollars.
One day one of these computers stopped working, and we immediately tried to get the software to work on a brand new W10 replacement. Took us a week of drivers hell, until we eventually went to the basement, found an exact replica, and swapped the HDD over.
The company, making these heavy machineries, went bankrupt in the early 2000s, and there was literally no way of getting the software to run on anything besides that original box.
I set up a 32 bit Windows 7 VM so my dad could keep using his old drawing program that was built for Windows 3.11.
It was the last version of Windows to support 3.11 compabillity.
Works well.
Just a note: Windows software for controlling hardware is highly likely to assume a)direct access to the hardware (sometimes mediated thorough ancient APIs and assuming the existence of defunct expansion slots) and b) assume meatspace time can be counted using OS timing ticks (which get stretched out as modern VMs timeshare with other processes underneath the virtulized hardware). It is awfully tough to replace them sometimes.
Yeah, I suspect you gotta do something similar to what McLaren did when the special mid 90s computer they used for the F1 got too hard to replace as they broke, they built a new computer interface that was compatible with modern computers and allowed them to interface with the car