The PCs were Dolch lunchbox style single board computers. I had to scrounge the one together for the mission I worked in 2013 by assembling it from a couple of others that were broken. Then I got the joy of installing DOS, to run good old TDP502.exe to handle the telemetry stream coming in. Every fifteen seconds I had to hit "Print Screen" to make the tractor feed printer attached to the machine do a print out of my screen. Kind of insane given that the ground station was making a Chapter 10 format recording of the same data, but NASA allowed no deviation from the way they had always done things.
Worst job I ever had.
(It's now supplemented with a beefy GPU self-hosted server, and I can also use cloud servers.)
One thing you can do to keep old production computer hardware going is to stockpile your backup/parts units and individual parts now. Many times I've noticed how some old hardware I used to see a lot of on eBay has disappeared, or the little remaining is in much worse condition, or only available as a single example priced like a museum piece that sits on eBay for years. Some small parts seem to be available despite what I'd guess is low market demand, but entropy gets a lot of old gear (increasingly stuck in collections, discarded, worn out, etc.).
Why use a 20 year old 500 Mhz dinosaur? Time. This machine can do everything I need (terminal, emacs, ssh, old modeling software that has a better GUI than any modern counter parts, etc) and cant do anything I should not do (browsing the internet)
But I would be very interested in pics, screenshots, and a rundown of your workflow if you have the time.
I’m increasingly shifting towards that side of the fence, looking at the web browser as the gateway to a toxic waste dump.
Luckily, I’m not doing frontend stuff, so I can survive (and blossom even) without a running browser.
The computer “feels” empty and quiet that way, like it used to feel back in the day when the modem was off.
(I occasionally window-shop vintage Sun gear like this, but SGI seemed to have more exotic unobtanium artifacts.)
If you're looking for another cool upgrade, I also did a 1920x1200 screen upgrade on mine. I wasn't able to find a Lenovo-native part, but I did find a pin-compatible screen out of a Dell mobile workstation that fit mostly perfectly, after sawing off some tabs with a Dremel.
(While deciding what to move to after T60, I tried a T400, T400S, T420, T520, T420S, T500, and some others, until I decided I wanted Coreboot, and liked the T500 display aspect ratio.)
I'm good for high-res T500 displays, but if/when I upgrade to a slightly newer ThinkPad platform, I'm targeting 1920x1080, and I'll probably have to screen-swap those, because that res. is a stock option, but rare.
Other than that, I can only guess. PSU and HDD is good idea. If you have an old industrial device that really needs floppies, buy them now, and also be looking into the retrofit options. For laptops, right now I've guessed at stockpiling keyboards, fans (but not the whole heatsink assembly FRU, just the fan part), backlight tubes, display inverter boards, AC adapters, the laptop-side AC adapter connector, HDD caddies and doors (often left out of replacements), upgrades for RAM and for faster/cooler CPUs.
If pressed, I'd say that the greatest changes for general office use in the last twenty years (for me) involve multiple monitor support and touchscreens.
That being said, I'm much happier with those features than without them!
Today, I'm happily using Windows 10 with Open Shell at work and Debian/LXDE at home.
I don't have the option of doing anything too out of the ordinary at work, because they've adopted MS Teams, rely on our calendars for scheduling, etc. I also make extensive use of a touchscreen and pen combination for annotating PDFs and I doubt (but you never know!) that any of the old OSes could handle that well.
Wires are connected directly to the PCB of the casette player so that with the help of the external device, metadata about the errors when reading can be stored. But the external device (DATerr/DATerrMON/DATerrLOG) is ancient. It's not mentioned in Google's search results, luckily there was a copy of the printed manual somewhere.
It talks via RS-232 to a regular office computer from the ninetees running windows 95 to an application running in DOS mode.
It's time to modernize the setup, as currently the win95 PC's disk already failed and had to be replaced. Luckily the program works perfectly under DosBOX, but the environment has to be tweaked a bit (NumLock must be on, or the program hangs, etc :))
Edit: I said windows 93 instead of (probably) 95.
ISA with DMA is probably the most frustrating to deal with because it's the most common. There's a host of ancient spectrophotometers and what not all needing HP's custom IEEE GPIB connection. Next most frustrating is still great, expensive equipment with a computer running Windows XP, and no upgrade path. Or the worst, an $800,000 direct electron detector purchased new from the manufacturer LAST YEAR running Windows Server 2012. This thing is 96 megapixel, 1500 fps, it NEEDS to be on the network.
Things were't as bad before they were digital. For instance, I was able to digitize a chart recorder for a liquid chromatography system from the early 80s with just a Raspberry Pi and Arduino. But a spectrophotometer from the early 90s? All non-compliant GPIB with no documentation. No realistic hope there.
With the amount of government money being forked over essentially to pay for or work around obsolescence, there should be a federal investigation.
The security implications of this mess were enormous. It's impossible to track the vulnerabilities on this old stuff, and challenging even to determine across the enterprise what is exposed to what.
I sometimes wonder why there isn't a market for an enterprise-specific/secured/stable web browser for just such applications, which isn't subjected to the churn of consumer chrome and firefox.
Hospital apps could safely target and rely on dated support + feature agreements and stuff.
I feel confident that I could keep that old stuff running well into the future, long after a more modern system was no longer repairable. The main fault with the capture cards seems to be that the input multiplexers fail, and while they can still be repaired by the manufacturer the two types of chip they use are something I keep in stock by the hundreds for building audio circuits.
The problem is if you require well documented, available software interfaces, your available options do not exist.
I've seen a lot of discussion around bad capacitors on forums dealing with old stereo equipment too. So it really does seem to have been a widespread issue.
clickable link from your post http://badcaps.net
This is pretty interesting, I wonder if there are special ways to get around this, or if you’d need something like an fgpa.
If you want to know exactly what clock cycle/time interval something is going to happen on, the easiest thing to do is just use a microcontroller.
Yep found it - BBC Domesday Project
Often, the old software interacts with the old hardware via bespoke physical interfaces that aren't supported by the VM in a way that actually works. And it's the hardware that's expensive to replace. Sometimes it's multiple interfaces, e.g., video is a separate interface than the internal controls of a microscope. If the hardware is old enough, the interface is an ISA or PCI card with custom drivers. My spouse has had more than one occasion when her lab was able to keep an instrument running due to the kindness of a service rep having some discontinued parts on hand.
"Pure" software that could easily run on a VM is more likely to be supplanted by new software that's rarely as expensive as hardware.
I have personally revived some old hardware by finding an interface spec and writing my own support code in Python. That might sound like a big effort, but often, a particular use of a hardware device involves a tiny subset of the device's full feature set.
DAT tapes are, as you mention, already storing digital data to begin with. Rather than "digitised", the data should be copied to modern storage as-is.
Judging on some cursory search[0] the only way to transfer the audio is to hook the drive through S/PDIF and play the whole tape. Looks like the ability to treat audio as the data (similar to the way we can treat AudioCDs as just a data disk filled with PCM) is rare and not quite the official [1]
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20071007220855/http://homepage.n...
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20071102094856/http://web.ncf.ca...
Not, say, 95?
I have a disk dump on my server. This is worth checking.
I was very glad to discover that the Raspbery Pi Pico had an actually good GPIO capable of interfacing with basically anything. But on your case, the standard is so old that any computer can deal with, using a software defined bus over a common serial line.
VMs can map a serial device into a COM port, so I believe it's transparent for Windows.
Those USB-GPIB tools work reasonably well for getting plots, but if you have an instrument that does weird things you're generally SOL.
I did think I could potentially use the USB to GPIB and interact directly over serial. There's one paper from the early 90s that describes the existence of a programming manual for the instrument, and gives a couple BASIC examples for how to do a certain type of analysis. But the actual programming manual itself seems lost to time. So for now, we are just limping along from vintage PC to vintage PC. We finally got one that uses ATX power supplies, so it should be easier to maintain.
Just doing the same old thing decade after decade.
However when I got to the employer the instruments had long been equipped with the HPIB interface option, but there was only one PC with an ISA HPIB card on one instrument. The others had HPIB networking a few instruments together amongst themselves, but interfaced to the PC through a modern HPIB-to-USB adapter.
One mass spectrometer just plain needs Windows 2000 for its software. Nothing newer will do. Lots of others are on XP.
The IT operators had begun moving office PC's to virtual, so virtual desktops were what they had for two newly purchased lab instruments.
It was a shitshow and eventually one of the robotic samplers destroyed itself not just virtually. It was never going to work again in reality.
This was not acceptable, labs have had computers a lot longer than PC's, and PC's a lot longer than offices have, and offices have had PC's a lot longer than they have had networks. And IT already had it's hands more than full with office machines and internet alone, where they were gaining expertise for our particular type of business which originally "networked" offices around the world quite well using Teletype. It was plain to see that network experts were only going to need a few years of chemistry lessons before they will have anything to offer the labs.
One of the most valuable assets is to have pioneering experience with computerized chemistry successfully for years before the mainstream arrival of desktop networks. How else would you know what computers would be capable of except at times when they were nothing but helpful?
So I kicked out IT and got 100x reliability. Didn't need their network printer anyway, and especially not the internet or remote access, focusing instead on making vintage instruments have more productive uptime than warranted purchases under vendor support.
Now it's all on my Windows 11 isolated lab network where I have integrated the latest vendor software packages to meet our particular client requirements like IT never would be able to. The older instruments each have as new a PC as I could get to run a proper vintage software for that particular model, this wasn't easy but it just works now.
Turns out the 30-year-old industrial hardware is way more reliable than the best IT can do with what they have to work with.
But we knew that.
Just use the O2 as a very powerful "dumb" terminal that keeps you from wasting your time. Its a great little machine.
Seriously though, I never tried HN. Should work.
Open Source software exists[0] for the purpose.
Anyway, you now need to acquire such drive, get to @jesprenj institution, tell them they are doing it wrong, threw out the current setup, replace the drive and the 'recording' station....
With a 30 y.o. tech which is obsolete for 20 years it's all.. questionable.
Next time I'll check if they use SPDIF or what. But the drive is a consumer-grade Sony. Shame I didn't take note of the model.
I probably should be keeping an eye out for maxing out my Octane and Fuel as well now before it is really too late.
If you google it you'll see what it is. I dont have an O2 so I dont remember the details.
EDIT:
Full machines with graphics are expensive. Luckily I got my fuel for $200 back in '09. I scored a V12 from a broken machine at the time cheap.
Parts are generally cheap. At least for the Fuel, the community now knows which DELL or some other server parts are equivalent to the SGI branded ones (SATA or Gigabit cards) and a lot of stuff is useless (why care for a SCSI card?). RAM is cheap if you see this as largely a vanity thing.
Finally, if you're good at debugging X (Im not), an origin 300 is a great machine. I bought one but I have the fuel for X client (works great). If I understand the problem, around 2007-2008 something changed in X11 (Xorg??) that broke compatibility with the SGI for 3D graphics.
