Technology

Most german thing I've heard today

An interesting assertion. A full install of 3.11 was about 8 MB or so, and all of the 8086 / -186 / -286 / -386 code will have been thrown away a long time ago. I doubt there's much of PROGMAN left, and all the fonts and art assets are long superseded. So in terms of total code, it can't be much. But on the other hand, the code that you write for an event loop or to handle driver interrupts hasn't changed conceptually very much in that time. Most programmers would reimplement the basics in a very similar way, so there's not much point in redoing it.

When I used to work in the water industry, we still had programmable logic controllers (PLCs) controlling pumpsets from the 1950s. The last person that could have modified them had retired and since died more than 30 years before. But deciding which pumps to run in order to best fill a reservoir is not logic that needs updating every day, not even every decade. Still working fine, don't touch it. So I still laugh at my colleagues that can't touch code that was written a few years ago in an unfashionable library. That's not tech debt. Try, written by your grandparents for CPUs that had stopped being made before you were born.

And I remember 3.11 being perfectly good enough at the time, anyway. Wasn't any Linux at that point.

If you go deep enough, there's still windows 3.11 dialog boxes in Windows 11 for some core functionality.

https://web.archive.org/web/20240102024352/https://ntdev.blog/2023/01/01/state-of-the-windows-how-many-layers-of-ui-inconsistencies-are-in-windows-11/

Inside a janitors closet, behind 24 firewalls, is a single SPARCStation serving the internal financial information for GE.

A single chair is in the converted closet for Hank to sit when they (it could be one person, or three working in shifts, no one is really sure. But they respond to "Hank") aren't putting out the most recent fire. The pile of used extinguishers are replaced daily. Hank likes his job. Hank doesn't like you. If you're lucky enough and get access through the 7 biometrically locked doors to exchange the extinguishers, it's been said you can hear mumblings from inside the closet about "uptime".

On September 30th, 2018, John Flannery, the CEO at the time, asked why this was all necessary and considered replacing this system with something more modern.

"I joke with people and say it's the Air Force's oldest IT system. But it's the age that provides that security,” Rossi said in an October interview. "You can't hack something that doesn't have an IP address. It's a very unique system — it is old and it is very good."

In 2016, the Government Accountability Office wrote that SACCS runs on an IBM Series/1 computer dating from the 1970s and that the Defense Department planned “to update its data storage solutions, port expansion processors, portable terminals and desktop terminals by the end of fiscal year 2017,” but it’s unclear whether those upgrades have occurred.

https://www.c4isrnet.com/air/2019/10/17/the-us-nuclear-forces-dr-strangelove-era-messaging-system-finally-got-rid-of-its-floppy-disks/

Like, names of presidents? Dude.