Comment by dahart
11 hours ago
> A certain nuclear power plant had a Windows NT 4.0 machine running as late as 2007.
To put this in perspective, NT 4 was released in 1996, 11 years before 2007. That’s roughly the same as someone running Windows 10 today, which a lot of people still do. The Pentium 1 was only 14 years old at most. These parts of the system shouldn’t be surprising.
The AmigaOS and software from the 80s are of course the older more interesting bits, but for critical infrastructure and safety, shouldn’t we expect and design for our hardware and software to last a long time, and not try to keep up with tech fads every decade? I feel like the main problem isn’t hardware or software that’s old, but that there wasn’t a longevity plan.
It’s always been an interesting question how to write software that will last a hundred years. Maybe with AI this is the first time in history that planning to port & upgrade to new hardware every 5-10 years seems totally reasonable.
> That’s roughly the same as someone running Windows 10 today
While true the situation is different. Hardware and software moved a lot faster in the 90's and early 2000's. Everything has matured, is far more standardized, and moves more slowly now. Hardware from 11 years ago when Win10 was released isn't that different from today's hardware. Same goes for Win10 and Win11.
There might be a seed of truth there, but FWIW, I’m not very convinced by that. CPU speed development has slowed down a bit for sure, but software development is going faster than ever. GitHub and NPM and Python 3 and Rust all didn’t exist in 2007. CUDA was first released that year. LLMs weren’t being used. At the start of 2007, the latest Windows version was Windows 5, one more than Windows 4. Almost same as today. There isn’t a Windows 12 yet, while Windows 6 was released in 2007. So the pace of major Windows versions might be slightly slower. OTOH, the OS is much bigger than it used to be and it gets more frequent updates and point releases now than it did in 2007.
> At the start of 2007, the latest Windows version was Windows 5, one more than Windows 4
Windows 2000 (NT 5.0) was released in 1999. Vista was NT 6, and released in 2006.
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