It still amazes me that some of the funky production machines I get to work with still run on VERY old technology.

As a for instance, today I got to work with an industrial laser cutting machine.
Not quite the same as the famous laser from the Goldfinger Bond film, but it was still cool to watch.

The control system runs from a PC base, controlled using an old MS-DOS system, and some clever ISA slot cards.

These dinosaurs of the PC age are not obsolete to all but a few geeks (I have to admit to installing MS-DOS 6.22 on my new Intel i7 920 based system! ) and, it seems, the manufacturing industry.

The 6.22 version of MS-DOS was originally released in 1994, and became ‘End of Life’ in 2001. The ISA slot system architecture was from WAY back in 1981.
With these two beauties controlling a machine worth many £1000′s,  keeping them running becomes more and more important ~ They simply can’t be easily replaced.

It’s kinda good that the antediluvian engineers who remember how to fly MS-DOS based systems are becoming more sought after though
It means there will be a use for us long after we fail to understand PCs.

Long live geeks

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Tor’s witty response to a client who said I “quite like computers” was “Is the Pope ‘quite’ Catholic!”

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