Thread

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

297 points · 304 comments · mlaux

freeli · 1790375986 · focus · HN ↗
A certain nuclear power plant had a Windows NT 4.0 machine running as late as 2007. The reason is interesting.
The machine's purpose was to report status of the control rods that mitigate nuclear reactions. Basically, "are the rods inserted, and if so, how many / how far?". I want to emphasize that this was reporting only, NOT control.
The original software was written back in the 80's, when the plant was originally commissioned, for AmigaOS. Of course, it's hard to buy Amigas anymore, and the original one died long ago (nobody remembers when).
So in the mid '90s, the utility purchased an AmigaOS emulator that ran on Windows NT 4.0, which was current at the time. The emulator (IIRC) was developed by a firm in the UK. The firm went out of business sometime in the late '90s. The control rod monitoring software ran under this emulator on top of NT4.
Windows NT 4.0 was the last OS to allow the emulation software direct access to the physical hardware that produced the status signal. Later versions of Windows abstracted the hardware access away, and the monitoring software broke. Because the emulation company had gone belly up, there was no way to fix the incompatibility.
So the utility had a choice: get new hardware/software certified (by NRC?), or keep doing what they were doing with the software (and hardware) that they had. They chose the latter.
So this is how, in 2007, during a tour of the facility, I stumbled across a Pentium 1 system running an AmigaOS emulator on Windows NT 4.0 that was responsible for displaying the status of the control rods of a nuclear power plant.
Spare hardware for this setup was purchased off of eBay and stocked on an adjacent shelf.
1. Froedlich · 1790382795 · focus · HN ↗
  A friend works for an airline as a flight simulator tech. Their entire software stack, including the compiler and OS, is FAA-certified.
  Then their ancient Honeywell(?) mainframes reached end-of-life they scouted for compatible hardware, of which there was none. The cost of certifying new software, plus the time involved, was astronomical. So, after consulting with the FAA, they paid a hardware company to clone the ancient mainframes in modern silicon. The FAA signed off on it, and they had all-new computers - much smaller than the originals - running the old stack.
  1. zx8080 · 1790384009 · focus · HN ↗
    It's _very_ hard to believe some company to simply "clone the mainframe" into chip. Mind sharing any link to this effort?
    theodric · 1790417421 · focus · HN ↗
    I mean...there's some precedent. The XKL TOAD ("Ten On A Desk") implements the PDP-10 instruction set, and will happily run TOPS-10/TOPS-20. LCM had one doing just that.
    <a href="https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/102773832/" rel="nofollow">https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/10277383... <a href="https://www.twenex.org/?network" rel="nofollow">https://www.twenex.org/?network
    hapless · 1790448453 · focus · HN ↗
    XKL is still in business (<a href="https://xkl.com/" rel="nofollow">https://xkl.com/)
    as far as i know the control plane on their equipment is still a pdp-10 compatible
    DonHopkins · 1790461747 · focus · HN ↗
    It's tempting to write a PDP-10 emulator for the Atari ST called TOAST.
    FWIW I'm developing "tiny-titan", a stand-in for Cambridge's Titan mainframe that talks to Heinz Lemke's 1972 PIXIE program over an emulated version of Neil Wiseman's PDP-7 <=> Titan link. It doesn't emulate Titan itself, just the conversation PIXIE had with it, so the unmodified 1972 PDP-7 code dials home and uploads its drawings.
    <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titan_(1963_computer)" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titan_(1963_computer)
    >Titan was the prototype of the Atlas 2 computer developed by Ferranti and the University of Cambridge Mathematical Laboratory in Cambridge, England. It was designed starting in 1963, and in operation from 1964 to 1973.
    <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49407938">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49407938
    <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40617894">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40617894
    Flight of the PIXIE - Yuja Wang:
    <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jDrqR9XssJI" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jDrqR9XssJI
    UNIVERSITY MATHEMATICAL LABORATORY, CAMBRIDGE: Cambridge Supervisor - Planning Document 10 Software for the Titan/PDP-7 link:
    <a href="https://cucps.soc.srcf.net/titan/supplan/pd10.htm" rel="nofollow">https://cucps.soc.srcf.net/titan/supplan/pd10.htm
    Here is a photo of Heinz Lemke operating PIXIE with the light pen and 340 display on the PDP-7 (also seen in the video above):
    <a href="https://www.facebook.com/groups/779220482206901/posts/6297725037023057/" rel="nofollow">https://www.facebook.com/groups/779220482206901/posts/629772...
    theodric · 1790542226 · focus · HN ↗
    Fascinating stuff; thank you for sharing. Can I follow your work somewhere??
    DonHopkins · 1790808630 · focus · HN ↗
    Thanks! I'm in the process of bailing from Medium, and I'm moving my stuff to a reimplemention of HyperTIES, the hypermedia browser I developed for NeWS in 1987-1990 at the University of Maryland Human Computer Interaction Lab, and I'm dogfooding it to publish all my other stuff:
    <a href="https://hyperties.org" rel="nofollow">https://hyperties.org
    Ostensibly the site is about HyperTIES itself, but I'm publishing other stuff there too like a PDP-7 emulator!
    <a href="https://hyperties.org/databases/pixie/pixie-live/" rel="nofollow">https://hyperties.org/databases/pixie/pixie-live/
    Here's a part of the demo I was giving at EduCom in October 1988 at the Sun booth on the trade show floor, across from the NeXT booth, where Steve Jobs and Bill Joy came by. Because he had shaved his beard, I didn't realize it was Bill Joy when I was showing him a demo of his head popping up! He took it pretty well though, better than Jobs.
    <a href="https://hyperties.org/databases/playground/sun-founders-big-heads/" rel="nofollow">https://hyperties.org/databases/playground/sun-founders-big-...
    Here's a paper looking back at HyperTIES:
    <a href="https://hyperties.org/databases/hyperties/a-look-back/" rel="nofollow">https://hyperties.org/databases/hyperties/a-look-back/
    anthk · 1790534233 · focus · HN ↗
    I'd happily run ITS on that.

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