I didn’t know whether to mark this NSFW or not but it’s time to buy a new computer if you haven’t upgraded in multiple decades.
I didn’t know whether to mark this NSFW or not but it’s time to buy a new computer if you haven’t upgraded in multiple decades.
I’m kind of shocked that it’s only been 18 years since the last 486 chip was made. It was launched in 1989 and discontinued in 2008, while the original Pentium was launched in 1993 and discontinued in 1999. Hell, the Pentium 4 was discontinued in 2007.
I think you can still buy new 486 compatible chips today.
https://www.vortex86.com/
It’s quite incredible, and very interesting. I wonder why they continued to produce these CPUs.
Probably for industrial machines.
Yeah, the amount of industrial machinery being controlled by ancient hardware would baffle a lot of people.
For a comparison people might relate to: There are ATMs running twenty year old versions of Windows XP.
Yup. Airplanes, for example, take a lot of validation. It’s extremely expensive to retest a new configuration, so they make one computer, get it validated, and use it unmodified for the next thirty years.
This is why the Boeing Max 8 thing was a big deal. They made approved modifications, but found in rare conditions it could cause unexpected and dangerous flight conditions. But, a times b times c was estimated to be less than the cost of doing it properly, so they didn’t.
Same with industrial automation. There’s some robotic arms, assembly lines, etc in use today that still use PCs with ISA slots - the predecessor to PCI, which was the predecessor to PCIe. Old 16-bit bus with a max speed of around 5Mbps. That’s why you’ll occasionally see newish “industrial” motherboards that have ISA slots and parallel ports.
They also often have a lot of the hardware in stock and ready to deploy, to handle replacements.
A project I worked on at university (way back in 2010) was for one of the largest providers of air traffic control systems. Our project was interesting - overlaying eye tracking data from Tobii eye trackers they provided (thousands of dollars each at the time) on top of screen recordings taken via VNC, to aid in training of air traffic controllers.
It was even more interesting to learn about some of their processes, though. Whenever they built an ATC computer system for a client, they’d build one or two spares at the same time, with exactly identical hardware. They did this for two reasons:
We got to see a storage room with a large number of these systems. Lots of different PCs anywhere from a month to maybe 15 years old. :)
Dude when those emails came out and we saw the engineer talking about how he wouldn’t let his own family fly on one to another engineer when asked…truly slackjawed moment.