15 Nov
2012
15 Nov
'12
9:34 a.m.
On 11/15/2012 08:48 AM, David Riley wrote:
On Nov 15, 2012, at 10:50 AM, Cindy Croxton
Electronics Plus wrote:
A lot of Japanese CNC tools from the 80s and 90s were based on the PC98
architecture, so direct replacement of the controller can be difficult.
I've even run into one or two old controllers that were based on the
Mitsubishi Multi-16 platform. Interesting in that it's one of the few
places where the old platform still exists.
Sent off a disk drive last week modified to work with a Mitsubishi wire
EDM tool--CP/M 86 running on a PC98 base.
--Chuck
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.