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Ask HN: Who's still keeping a DOS machine up because the business depends on it?

297 points · 304 comments · mlaux

  1. mikewarot · · focus · HN ↗
    The Gear cutting job shop I worked for had a CNC lathe running with a GE Computer from the late 1970s that stored data on punched Mylar tape, until it was bought out in 2019.

    The bevel gear generator setup was some formula calculations running in version 1 of TK!solver, which would have been a $5000 upgrade to get the latest version, so they ran them under MS-DOS in DOSbox, and saved the grief.

    Without that software, they would have to pay Gleason $500+ to do the calculations for each new gear setup.

    There are strong and reasonable reasons to keep very old systems alive in offline production environments.

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