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

[Rod Smallwood]

On 27/05/2016 23:11, Swift Griggs wrote:
> 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
The main issue I had was migrating code to the next version of windows 
or the development environment.
We had a lot of code that talked to accounting systems. In particular a 
UK product called Sage.
Imagine having to take care of  version changes in windows, visual basic 
and Sage all at the same time.

The big change was the move from vb to vb.net. That is to say to object  
oriented programming.
Microsoft were a little naughty in saying it was the next version of vb. 
It wasn't. It was a whole new ball game.
In my part of the industry over half of the commercial  vb programmers 
took one look and retired on the spot.

Me ? well I loved it.  Once you grasped the ideas then you could do so 
much more. Microsoft support was very good if a little distant.
They gave away the development environment because the code only ran 
under windows and therefore leveraged windows sales.

Rod