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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

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. sajithdilshan · 1790413535 · focus · HN ↗
  This is crazy. Why on earth wouldn’t the respective government spend money to modernize a critical infrastructure like a nuclear power plant?
  This is how we would end up with nuclear disasters, not because the technology is bad, but purely because of mismanagement and human negligence.
  1. mitxela · 1790419299 · focus · HN ↗
    Now you know why "nuclear power may have been dangerous in the past, but with modern technology it's completely safe and Chernobyl will never happen again" is not a good argument.
    sajithdilshan · 1790425172 · focus · HN ↗
    Chernobyl didn’t happen because of technological blunder or even human negligence. It happened because poverty caused by communism in Soviet Union had to use old outdated (not the modern nuclear technology at that time) graphite tips in carbon rods because it was cheap and also kept it as a secret from the facility operators giving them a false sense of trust on the kill switch.
    Chernobyl is the perfect example to not use outdated old technology. Had they used the modern western technology at that time to upgrade their nuclear reactors the kill switch would have prevented the whole disaster instead of increasing the neutrons make the core a nuclear bomb.
    Next time educate yourself with facts before making a fool out of yourself
    jodrellblank · 1790435368 · focus · HN ↗
    > old outdated
    Wikipedia's pages on Chernobyl say that construction started in 1972 and the problem with the control rods causing an initial spike of power was discovered in 1983 ?
    [1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_Nuclear_Power_Plant" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_Nuclear_Power_Plant
    [2] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster#Accident_sequence" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster#Accident_se... (search 'Ignalina nuclear power plant')

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