Well, you didn’t study hard enough then, didn’t you.
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Unintentionally, I swear!
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I can think of few things that would be less surprising. Every company I’ve dealt with that makes any physical thing has a system somewhere that can’t be reasonably updated because it relies on some feature or software that stopped being supported decades ago. I know when I worked in the print shop we had a half dozen computers in the prepress room that only existed to support old software or hardware. Some of them were only turned on once a year, but that one time was the difference between keeping or losing a major corporate client.
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For a while NIST was planning on shutting down their “radio time” signals that allow those fancy self-setting clocks and watches to work. The argument was that GPS was a superior replacement for future such clocks (and they’d work outside the US). However there was a large outcry against doing this. It turns out that besides people with self-setting watches, a lot of industrial equipment uses the signal and so it will be continued for the foreseeable future.
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My first job out of college was at this web design company who office was inside a larger warehouse/office space for a company that imported hats and also did embroidery designs.
One day they were throwing some stuff out and I dug around and found these spools of paper with holes punched into them. They said it was for an old embroidery machine and it was code for a design. I saved one for the novelty of it, but I am not sure I still have it.
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He is still alive so perhaps not that surprised.
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Holy cow. TIL. Amazing.
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My mom used knitting machines that utilized punch cards to control patterns. AFAIK they still sell them.
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I did. Early 80’s, coding in Fortran. I’m trying to remember if I actually had to hand them to an acolyte to see if the code compiled correctly.
In high school, I wrote BASIC programs using a teletype, and outputting to punch tape.
But a real trip is how many companies still deeply, deeply rely on Cobol.
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It depends on what machines you were using. In high school in the 1980s we had an old Honeywell minicomputer with a card punch and reader that was donated by a local bank when they upgraded systems. At the same time we also had Apple ][ microcomputers which of course used 5.25" floppies for storage.
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Ah, FORTRAN77… Good times.
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In the electronics industry, as well as the medical industry and others, a lot of instruments still run on 20-year-old embedded computers running Windows 95/98. These instruments work just fine but cannot be updates to newer OSs due to proprietary software/drivers. It’s just not worth the money and waste to replace them.
You just have to hope that the owners either keep them off the network or put them behind very good firewalls.
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True. For me in the early 80s at school it was BBC Micros using 5.25" floppies, at home it was ZX Spectrums with cassette tapes. By the late 80s it was Archimedes at school, Amigas at home, all with 3.5" floppies.
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Ha! Me too!
I worked in COBOL most of my career. The last 10 years of which was working on a commercial business management system which is still being used, sold, and maintained (barely) today. This was developed in OOCOBOL which is very cool. 
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I work in IT for a Healthcare company. I am in no way surprised how much old crap we have.
Before this job I had this naïve idea that, as peoples lives were affected Healthcare would have the best of the best. Gods above and below was that shocked out of me very quickly.
The number of “state of the art” medical devices still running Windows XP is amazing (and not in a good way)
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A hospital network administrator once told me that the biggest problem he faced with the old gear is that “Doctors are gods.” If that scanner can send them an email with the images they need, then you damn well better hook it to the f*cking network now! Windows 98 isn’t the doctors’ problem, their patient might be dying!
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cobol’s a dead language , as dead as dead can be
oh , first it killed the dinosaurs *
and now , it’s killing me
but , seriously folks !! cobol is a complete language , oriented towards common business issues , it is still fine and dandy in it’s niche !! one can even do fun things with it , like writing an assembler for microcontrollers ! or , other state machines !
also isam , once prevalent in cobol , indexed sequential access method is still kewl and primal and useful for many tasks
- dinosaur was a term for ibm 360/370 class mainframes
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