For a taste you can read through https://www.scribd.com/document/442402647/5A-Monitor-prog-Si...
Working with it, yes. Developing for it? Completely different game, as you'll have almost zero chance to use anything modern, and that includes the tooling.
If you're developing for an embedded system, you may not want to use anything "modern".
TL;DR: I wouldn't be surprised if it's harder to support Win8 today than Win3.1 ;)
https://stadt-bremerhaven.de/bahn-administrator-fuer-windows...
> "Deutsche Bahn is unable to cope with the simplest tasks of daily rail operations,” says a senior European railway official [0]
In this case, however, I think they are doing the right thing in keeping software that has been working reliably for over 30 years.
[0] https://www.spiegel.de/politik/deutschland/deutsche-bahn-str...
Well, it's cheaper than state run. And that comes at a cost.
Through one of my companies we were/are involved in many of these efforts (e.g. application virtualization) and the use of legacy software [1]. Win 3.11 is a relatively easy target. Much much easier than other projects we dealt with.
[1] https://blog.nektra.com/2014/02/12/nektra-escalation-support...
5/6 years ago... Everything could have changed again by now.
Yeah but these things are built from scratch. Your average ages-old Borland or whatever suite with its build script? That's a lot of work to integrate with a modern IDE, and honestly I wouldn't risk it in that space either due to the potential for things to go horribly sideways. So you need at least the OS and build tooling combination that was used for the last certified build, and if certification requirements are really strict you can't do that in a VM but have to develop on age-appropriate hardware as well.
From my 25 years of commuting experience, the results are decidedly mixed:
* the track-managing state corporation, Správa železnic, is a shitshow that causes a lot of unnecessary delays by just ignoring needs of passengers and cargo companies alike; true bureaucrats,
* the highway-managing state corporation, Ředitelství silnic a dálnic, is very well managed by the latest director (Mátl) and really kicked off many projects in last years, which is notable in a very NIMBY-friendly country like Czechia,
* the state-owned railway company, České dráhy, used to be terrible, but competition forced it into providing quite decent services within last 10 years or so.
* the two main private competitors, Leo Express and Regiojet, are now visibly cash-strapped (esp. Regiojet), so the overall level of service has stagnated for several years. High costs of traction electricity don't help either. As of today, there isn't really a qualitative difference between boarding state-owned or privately-owned trains.
Switzerland just pays four times as much per capita for railway infrastructure.
And of course, it's small: a bit more than a tenth of the area, a tenth of the total operated railway length, a tenth of the population. There are economies of scale, but also system complexity that scales super linearly. Afaict, a train that takes four hours from start to finish is on the long side in Switzerland, not so much in Germany.
But I'm not saying that financing and management aren't the main problems. The current CEO of SBB has a background in computer science and railway transport. Many of the DB CEOs in the past 25 years had an MBA and a career in air travel.
It has a lot of autonomy and is responsible for its own failures in my opinion.