Before you click the link, please try and answer the question past the blurb.
I am still using it at work, but not at home since 2001 when I upgraded to Windows 2000 – then I upgraded to XP in 2002 and this was the last Windows version I ran at home. After that I upgraded to Linux/Unix and have not had any reason to look back.
So, this person is still using Windows 95 at work today. Before clicking through – can you guess what this person’s job is?
I’d say that the person works in an hospital or a clinic, so either a nurse, doctor or medical secretary. I have done a small internship in the IT service of a clinic, around 2003 and they still had severely outdated stuff.
That was my guess too. In the UK it was quite a recent news story that the NHS had security issues due to running XP. Use of 95 in that domain wasn’t out the question.
Side note: in the story itself, when I saw the picture of the previous technology with loads of manual controls, that looked preferable to a touchscreen to me! I’m a software developer, but when I take photographs my favourite camera is a fully manual, mechanical 1970s film camera. So tactile and rewarding to use.
Paradroid,
+∞
Touchscreens & digital interfaces were cool for a while, but technology regressed big time with the loss of tactile controls 🙁
The peak was when had technology starting to embracing both digital and tactile I/O. Things like midi controlled mixers are so much easier to program & manipulate when there are physical analogues.
This is awesome…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fptHiP1lzM4
The video demonstrates simple remote control, but in a recording studio setting you are able to record all the inputs, play them back several times and adjust the settings by physically overriding the controls. It is quite intuitive.
Professionals can still buy that I suppose, but it’s being replaced by touchscreens. which are much cheaper, but it’s extremely awkward to manipulate several onscreen parameters simultaneously and it’s a lot easier to accidentally make unwanted changes. I don’t blame anyone who goes the cheap route, but tactile is so much better IMHO. Even just simple volume controls were better (faster and more accurate than the digital replacements).
Here’s an example of modern technology that does it worse, it’s all on screen. They use a touchpad to manipulate a mouse cursor to manipulate a skeuomorphic interface of real controls.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bfAZuo8S5gs
I’m sure the artists are happy to have the tools, especially if they can’t have the real thing – I get it. But so many new levels of indirection, ugh. What a downgrade from the old-school tools.
> my favourite camera is a fully manual, mechanical 1970s film camera.
The venerable K1000? Do any of the major manufacturers make interchangeable digital/film backs anymore?
Meh Win95 would have been considered high tech for the mill I used to have to support as until it finally closed down in 2018 it was running a CNC that cut custom columns that ran Win 3.1!
It not only ran 3.1 but it had to have an ISA card to I/O to the CNC until I talked them into hiring an old engineering buddy (RIP Dave you are missed) who managed to reverse engineer the ISA card (the company that built the CNC had closed in the early 90s so good luck getting any data on it) so it could be run on a serial port box he cooked up for the thing.
IDK where the big machines that were there went when the place closed so who knows, maybe at some lumber mill somewhere is Dave’s serial box running on my old 100Mhz former DOOM gamer rig chugging away making columns.
My vote goes to a metal shop or something like that. Where heavy machinery is controlled by a computer.
This was mine as well. I was working with one back in 2004 that still had a machine running with windows 3.11 .
My thought go for airplane operator, but luckily I was wrong 😀 I`m curious – how stable that OS is in train.
Jim Raynor,
No joke, on one flight from JFK the captain announced that the computer needed to be rebooted, we were told it posed no danger but we could not ascend to cruising altitude without the computer and it wasn’t allowed to be rebooted from the air (I have no idea how much of this is true, but it’s what we were told as passengers). We circled for ~3 hours waiting to land at the airport we took off from. They took off again without passengers to make sure the problem was fixed, landed again, we re-embarked and got to destination 8 hours late at around 3AM. On top of this we had an hour drive at each airport. It would have been about an 8 hour drive by car, we choose poorly, haha.
That event only ranks as the 3rd worst flight for me. The worst was when were arriving from an international flight into JFK and ended up circling for a few hours before they announced that they would have to divert to their backup airport because they were too low on fuel to continue circling in queue, we were diverted to new jersey, but the passenger terminals were closed. Because it was an international flight they said they couldn’t let us go, so we were detained for maybe 7 hours, half of that still onboard the airplane on the ground. We were at the wrong airport mind you, everyone still had to make travel arrangements and nobody knew when we would be released from customs. So it was still another 2 hour taxi drive to the original airport where someone had to pick us up and drive another hour a half through rush hour. No compensation either. All told, it was close to 24 hours in some form of transit.
Delays are very common but you don’t want to be on one of the outliers, haha.
https://thestacker.com/stories/2090/most-chronically-delayed-flights-america
As long as it doesn’t need to connect to the internet, there’s no real security risk, so sure, why not?
Moochman,
You’re right, as long as it’s not connected you significantly minimize the risk, however it is a bit concerning because windows 95 wasn’t even stable in it’s heyday, accidental blue screens were kind of common. Bill gates experienced it on-stage at his win98 demo and I suspect the majority of windows users were already familiar with it at home too. So it wasn’t particularly robust…it would have been more appropriate to go with NT, what were they thinking? But anyways as long as they don’t try anything new then in all likelihood they won’t ever step on any windows functionality that would trigger crashes.
The post doesn’t clarify what the system does, but it’s probably not critical. It may just be for time-tracking or something…?
None of the above seem particularly unusual, so I’m guessing it’s either something critical and dangerous like a nuclear power station, or a neglected corner of a certain Redmond, WA-based software company.
My guess is a CNC operator or the like.
Edit: I was wrong
Back in 2001, when I was doing an internship at an electronics r&d company, they had a (not sure if this is the correct translation) climatic cabinet, which was controlled by some old 286. For such devices, with custom controllers and software, it would be hard to upgrade, especially if the original manufacturer has gone many years ago. Therefore, I understand the use of legacy computers to control interface with certain equipment. If it ain’t broken, don’t fix it…. but if the hardware break down… that might be a problem. Back then, it’s hard disk crashed… I’ve put in a new hard disk, but then they couldn’t find the installation floppies for the software.
So… my guess would be, the old configuration would be to control some piece of custom hardware. But what kind of equipment, that’s a tough guess.
Alright, I’ve not looked at the article or other comments…
… Some kind of machine operator, CAM, maybe for controlling a router or mill.
Looks like two thirds of us had about the same idea and were all about the same amount of totally wrong.
M.Onty
Maybe wrong about the specific person Thom was referring to, but maybe not so wrong that the old operating system is still being used that way. There are still production DOS systems around. A lot of heads up displays we see around us run windows CE. I’m sure there are still OS/2 deployments. Old technology is everywhere 🙂
Going around an deprecating things willy-nilly has a cost. Namely, it causes people to stick with old versions of operating systems.
When the transition to Windows NT happened with Windows XP, Microsoft went ahead and deprecated several perfectly valid and public APIs found in Windows 9x, such as some 256-color Direct3D modes, which simply returned with an error in Windows XP, and NTVDM had known bugs. Users were told they should upgrade regardless (somehow.) Windows Vista also killed some perfectly valid and public DirectDraw APIs and DOS fullscreen support. When Windows XP support expired, Windows users were told to upgrade regardless. The cost of Microsoft not shimming those APIs (like Wine does btw) and not giving us a proper NTVDM should run in the millions of dollars in rewriting costs, but it’s all “normal”, we are told.
And the sad thing is the open-source community isn’t much better with their native APIs, moving fast and breaking things.
PS: I understand the need to kill some XP driver compatibility in Vista (which was due to happen anyway around that timeframe due to the move to 64-bit), but there is no excuse for not shimming perfectly valid and public APIs.
In my small shop we used to run the cashier system on an old win95 pentium2 computer till last year. The latest fiscal policies ruled to have modern cash registers. Now we are suffering under a Win POS system ( basically a win 7 spin-off).
My main concern on very old systems still doing useful things is not about hacking, they are isolated from network on most places or were not even connected from the get go, from my POV, the problem is that it become way more common to have “invisible” malfunctioning that can trigger accidents/operational errors. Saw it many times with memories going bad and VRMs not able to keep up whenever a more demanding task was activated. On cases like these, it is way better to suffer a nonrecoverable failure as it will prompt a substitution procedure instead of giving “random/unpredictable” outcomes.
acobar,
Who’s to say they didn’t upgrade the hardware?
x86 computers have an excellent track record for backwards compatibility.
The installer has a few issues, but if you had an up to date win95 system it could be possible to still boot it today.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D-AfnudOET4
Regarding hardware problems, I know that’s real but I don’t think it was more problematic in the past than today. I’ve had “modern” computers fail even while older computers continue to run fine. I’ve only lost one desktop to time. Laptops seem to do worse for me, I’ve lost several. My parents lost a nettop computer after about a year and a half, the desktop replacement lasted maybe 13 years before getting rid of it. I don’t know for sure, but I’d speculate that failure rates are highly correlated to heat density (more power/heat in less space=shorter life).
Windows per se is not the problem but ancient proprietary boards are. Sometimes, it is quite hard to fix controller boards for mechanical hardware inside old equipments, like CNCs, specialized scanners and so on. Many of the manufacturers that survive and are still on same segment business end up saying that almost all things must be replaced.
I’m sure big companies can put aside some money for that, but for small business it is a painful path.
acobar,
Sure, but I’m just not convinced it’s really gotten better. Smaller features require tighter manufacturing margins and it isn’t immediately obvious that it’s more reliable. Also I wouldn’t be surprised that as prices have dropped and we’ve shifted manufacturing to the cheapest parts of the world, quality may have actually dropped.
It might be worth considering that NASA prefers older computer chips for it’s mission critical systems.
https://qz.com/317406/why-nasas-newest-space-shuttle-uses-a-computer-chip-from-2002/
Alfman,
About NASA, perhaps, they prefer old chips because the node size is bigger so, I suppose, they are more robust against the very aggressive ambient on space (we had a chat about space radiation a long time ago and its effects on electronics).
Anyway, capacitors going bad, electric migration and thermal fatigue is a problem for really old circuits. Somehow, many of us forget that it is not because the moving parts are basically electrical on nature that wear off is not present, it is, only of a different kind.
My guesses (2nd part is more serious than 1st part)
1) The machine that tells you which Windows Updates apply to your machine
2) The machine that is used for used for collecting and processing user feedback at Microsoft
3) The development machine for Leisure Suit Larry 4
4) The WayBack Machine
5) The development machine of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sloot_Digital_Coding_System
6) “TypeWriter” of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_R._R._Martin
a) Military
b) Public transport
c) Manufacturing
d) Medical
My guess is some large national retail company. I know of one that is still running DOS on all their POS systems, even though they also have iPads for sales staff.
I expected him to be working with intrinsically safe critical systems stuff, and I wasn’t too far off being correct because nobody wants their train driving off the end of a track.
I work with much the same type of stuff, mostly scientific and medical metrology systems that are too expensive to retire and too expensive to upgrade. Microscopes, interferometers, scanners of all sorts most of it not needing a real time OS. I’ve come across all sorts of people still using Win 95, it’s much wider than you expect. For example, space uses a special ultra-durable hardened grade of electronic hardware that lends itself to using older OS. I wouldn’t be surprised to find some aviation still using old MS OS, I know some commercial aircraft run a version of Linux over a decade old.
An old OS, any old OS, are a known known when you need something to work reliably.
Some of the legacy systems I work on you could replace the whole control rack with a modern FPGA(Sort of anyway). Most of the time now I’m adding passive remote or cloud sensors to very old systems to give people some more modern utility on old hardware.
German judges in Berlin still use Windows 95. They have acrewed up the migration to Windows 10 in the last month and going back to 95
Tell us more please. What do they use them for?
I know a bookshop owner in Bristol who, three or so years ago at least, was still using a Windows 9x PC. Not for some exotic categorisationg or POS system, that seemed to be done on paper. He was using it behind the desk for browsing the web, emails, all the normal stuff. I only hope someone had told him about kmeleon, because I have visions of IE5…
Guess which version of windows start up screen will greet me when I start up the computers on a Siemens Desiro ML next week.. I can’t check now, but if my memory doesn’t let me down it is windows 3.11.
Not Win 95, but I have an old HP Omnibook XE2 which runs Windows 98 SE. I have a program on it which has material in a proprietary format that’s not available anywhere else, and which I occasionally need to use. I guess I could (and probably should) turn it into a VM, but I do quite like the feeling of using a laptop I bought over 20 years ago.