19 Jun
2013
19 Jun
'13
7:43 p.m.
My brothers company is a specialty shop that does IT related services
(mostly custom development work) for small to mid-sized manufacturing
companies (bro is an industrial engineer by training...he speaks the
language). He periodically pings me because a client has something outside
of his core competency and he want's me to take a look and see if someone
in my network can help out. Sometimes it's a PDP-8 (or several) running an
industrial loom, or a DG Nova controlling a CNC machine the size of a bus,
or some ancient IBM thing cranking out invoices/schedules/statistics in the
back room. Or an industrial grade PC (8088 vintage) running a DOS app and
custom A/D-D/A hardware where all the menus and doco were in Italian
controlling a fabric dyeing machine about the size and shape of a Soyuz (I
got the call on this one because I can passably read Italian, not because
of a technical value add). There's a cadre of folks I can count on to help
out and never fail to miracle the odd replacement part or bit of code to
keep things going (for a price, of course).
There will absolutely be shops running things much older than a PDP-11 in
2050.