15 Nov
2012
15 Nov
'12
8:48 a.m.
On Nov 15, 2012, at 10:50 AM, Cindy Croxton Electronics Plus wrote:
I don't know about 8088s still being used in the
mass market, but we still
build 80386s for CNC use. We even have one customer that runs his entire
machine shop off Apple IIs!
Apparently it is a lot cheaper to keep buying old machines and patching
things up than it is to spend $100,000 plus for new software to do whatever
they do.
Cheaper and more reliable. We had a steel mill as a client at work
who had an aging Multibus based real-time control system running
their rolling presses; not the sort of thing where you want
something to go wrong, or you lose something like a million dollars
worth of steel and production time while you clean up the buckled
ingot from the stands.
We ended up replacing it with a National Instruments Core2 Duo
system which worked quite well, except there was one pesky bug in
their Ethernet drivers which would hang the entire system from
time to time and was damn near impossible to track down, which is
exactly the kind of nightmare people are worried about when
replacing an old, working system with a new, unproven one.
In the end, we only buckled one ingot, and it turned out it was
because there was something in their existing system that didn't
quite match the reams of system documentation.
- Dave