On 12/20/22 20:51, Chris via cctalk wrote:
Well there doesn't seem to be a great deal of activity these days, I has
thought the suggestion about relaxing the rules might need discussing.
I know there are people still using Windows 2003 puters, or a near equivalent
based on XP? But that's entirely irrelevant, as I'm quite sure you could find
someone out there still utilizing an 8088/286/386. Of course that's the
discretion of the sysop. As it stands there's at least 1 opinion for every
ahole attached to the person who types on this board. Whateber. The way I see
it dang obsolete shouldd be open for discussion.
We inherited an expensive piece of gear from a different
department in our university. It came with an ISA-bus
computer that ran DOS 3.1 That computer was very cranky and
finally died. I tried putting the hard drive in one of my
old computers, and it showed the instrument was working.
So, we bought an industrial PC with ISA slots that was
guaranteed to run software as far back as DOS. Then, we
installed DOS 6.2 on it, and had to put in some fancy
drivers to get the ancient ANSI graphics the software
required to show up on the screen. This thing doesn't even
use a mouse, you click the arrow keys and it highlights
boxes on the screen, then you hit F keys to activate options.
I bought a Quad QSA30A pick and place machine, made around
2000. It runs a Celeron 733 MHz CPU and has one ISA slot
that interfaces to a dual port memory card that connects to
a 68040 VME processor that runs the whole machine. The PC
is just the user interface, and how you set up the assembly
job and deal with errors. The software runs under Win 95,
and needs to be 95 or 98 since the software goes directly to
the hardware. There is an "optimizer" that reorders the part
placement sequence and nozzle changes for faster production,
and it was (occasionally) screwing up the placement file. I
got a slightly newer version of that program, and so far it
SEEMS to not cause the scrambling, but it was intermittent.
So, maybe that was a case of "bit rot".
So, I still use some old PC systems by necessity.
I also use an electronic design program (Protel 99 SE) that
originally ran on Win 95, then Win2K, and now I run it under
VirtualBox with Win XP on my Linux system.
Jon
