What do you mean, this bad boy is probably powering a semi-critical government system somewhere, definitely not obsolete.
Edit: not even joking or shitting on it, there’s probably a proprietary software system out there somewhere that a contractor was paid to build ages ago. The contractor is out of business or doesn’t support it anymore, but it works perfectly in its one little spot. Also an update is gonna cost a quarter of a million dollars.
I’ve seen disk chart meters at facilities that are 40+ years old and need a new disk chart every so often. You could replace it with a digital meter, but that won’t integrate with the rest of the control panel and a third party took over production of the disks 15 years ago. The system works great and it’s unlikely to be updated unless they stop making the disk charts.
Edit 2: the correct term is circular chart recorder
See also: Pennsylvania State Emissions Testing System
This is super true. I occasionally visit a TRIGA reactor that was built decades ago, and a good chunk of the computers critical in infrastructure run comically old versions of windows since software used to operate the faculty was a custom job.
I had almost this exact scenario happen with a CNC machine for a very old but profitable niche company. Pain in my ass.
Seems like this issue is across a few different industries. I had two CnC machine running software on old PC’s with special cards to interface with the drives. One was running in a Dos box while the other was running windows XP. We could never afford any down time so it was fine some old PC’s that can still run this stuff.
There are some data recording systems on planes designed in the 90s that still use the original designs. Memory cards that are as big as your hand and only hold megabytes worth of data.
Upgrading would be fairly simple in theory, but getting anything approved to be used on an aircraft is an expensive pain in the ass so they don’t want to go through that. They don’t need any more storage capacity either.
So somewhere out there some companies are making these now ancient parts for now ancient systems, and probably making a killing because nobody else makes them.
Holy shit my grandfather had this exact PC up until ten years ago or so lol
God,the number of these I sold at Best buy…rolling my eyes the entire time…and making absolutely sure the customer understood exactly what that phrase meant in this ultra-scammy context…
Ended up not being able to handle that job. Something about literally full-time debunking of lies printed on everything in sight was exhausting for me.
I sold a bunch of them used… Lol…
They were basically obsolete the minute they were shipped to stores with the shitty Celeron CPUs, virtually no RAM, and tiny hard drives but people still bought them from me a year later for too much money.
Cmon that thing will run Linux like a champ!
if your distro of choice happens to be debian with openbox
In my experience neither computers nor women will accept a 3.5 inch floppy.
That’s why we called them stiffy drives. It’s the 5.25inch disks that were floppy.
Common ig has a Celeron!
It always baffles me when like the old hard drive fit in the RAM of am average today PC. What will it be in 10-20 years, 2TB RAM in an average PC?
Man, I remember when everyone on planet Earth said “8 GB is all you need.” Anymore, 8 GB is pretty low spec. I had to upgrade an old laptop (from 2016) from 6 GB to 16 because the CPU is just fine for what I do with the laptop (surf yt, check email) but the lack of RAM was making it hang up because it kept having to dump stuff into and out of swap.
My first PC had a 170 MB (!) hard disk and 4 MB RAM. After an upgrade to 8 MB it could (barely) run Windows 95.
Moore’s law will speeddown and then die, tech advancement per space will stagnate. Also, no home PC needs 2 TB of RAM.
We old-timers have heard that exact argument for like forever. Didn’t happen.
Even Intels chief engineer thought that after 3um there would be impossible to reach 1um.
1um = 1000nm BTW and we’re at like 3nm
I’m reading the other comments, and wondering why do people need to be binary like that? Yes, diminishing returns are a thing, so we shouldn’t expect the same degree of improvements, but stating hard limits is also something that usually gets laughed several years later.
It will still run Windows 98 just fine.
This PC has the clocks and it rocks, but it was obsolete before you opened the box.
antiX linux on a zip drive
How many sales stickers can one machine have?
Manufacturer mandates a certain amount of flair.
no no no no, it’s not a mandate, it’s just that we encourage self expression here in the PC market. You do want to express yourself, right?
Someone remembers Office Space far better than I do! Lol
eMachines were obsolete two years before they were even built.
The sticker was supposed to be “Newer obsolete”.
Most of people use computers just for memes and emails, so yea, it is never obsoluted.
How you gonna post memes on a machine that doesn’t support modern browser protocols? This thing can’t even load the Google home page or probably any Lemmy/kbin instance.
I mean, it’s not like they managed to get AI assistants running on win3.1 or anything…
https://www.dialup.net/wingpt/
People should appreciate old but serviceable hardware. There is nothing about net communication that exceeds what an 566mhz core can do. At that point it’s just a question about porting a TLS/SSL library…
You don’t. You post animated gifs
The “never obsolete” refers to a subscription service, where they would periodically send you updates somehow. LGR has a good video on this.
Click here to download more RAM!!
they just mean, you just need to replace each component and it will be good as new!
you know, motherboard,ram,ps,cpu. those drives prolly work today if you have an ide and floppy headers… might need some molex power adapters
it connects to the internet, dude, just download more ram
Comouter tower of Thebes.
Reminds me of my first desktop PC.
Intel Pentium II 266Mhz, 64MB of RAM, 2.99GB HDD.
Of course a 3.5" floppy drive was also included, and a CD-R Reader.
I had to purchase a 33.6k modem separately, tho.
