Windows use in medical spaces (Re: vintage computers in active use)

[Swift Griggs]

On Fri, 27 May 2016, Rod Smallwood wrote:
> Please can we have some specific instances of Windows causing problems. 

Windows 95 - 98 either blue screened or locked up daily, no matter what 
you did. In fact, IIRC, there was a timer bug that would _insure_ the 
system couldn't stay up for more than 49 days 
(https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/216641). That's an eyeblink in the 
kind of uptimes I'm used to in the Unix world.  Don't even get my started 
on Windows 3.x with Trumpet Winsock I could write a Ph.D thesis on 
stupidity with that much material.

> Not unqualified people at home or students but real production 
> environments with qualified support on hand. I used every version of 
> windows from 1 to 10.  yes XP and millennium too

My dad used to tell me how he thought Windows was great too. He worked for 
a company that designed and built chemical refineries (some in the US, but 
mostly small plants in remote parts of the world). They had to stop using 
Windows in any man-machine interfaces, because:

(this was XP and win2k)> 

1. People in Iraq or Siberia would put games on them and of course that 
broke them. 

2. They got tired of flying out engineers to fix issues that were windows 
centric, like a NIC bug that kept kicking machines off the ethernet. 

They moved to QNX and they absolutely love it now.

At this point in the life of Windows, I can believe it's MUCH more stable 
than those old Win95 based DOS-predicated systems. However, being a Unix 
zealot, I'd refer you to the same list Mouse posted earlier about why he's 
not a Windows booster. I'm totally on the same page with him. It's not 
only the reputation for lower stability, it's all the other heinous crap 
M$ has pulled over the years. Trust == nonexistent.

> I wrote time and mission critical food distribution related software for 
> the ten years before I retired in vb and then vb.net (oo)  I would have 
> seen just about every possible bug in windows and in developing 
> applications under it.

You are probably a good coder who knows how to tweak Windows and make it 
do what you need. I don't doubt that's possible. However, there are still 
other factors (like the ones I mentioned earlier) that can make it less 
desirable. Plus, there is a ton of absolutely horrible Win32, MFC, and VB 
code. Not that I write on those APIs, admittedly, but I've experienced 
plenty of the application failures that result.

-Swift