Pretty cool to hear about big NW installs! Thanks for sharing!
We're actively working on moving that customer off Netware entirely. The main reason they can't get away from it is they're running a custom god program that manages the entire business, and it's tied in pretty tightly with their old configuration. The whole thing is in Delphi 7.
W.R.T. old hardware, they are actually some of the newer old boxes we support! My main line of business is keeping old industrial control systems online and reliable. On the PC side, the oldest stuff we have in 24/7 operation is 286-based. Pre-PC, we have a few customers running CNC stuff on PDP-11s. I don't know if we still have any PDP-8 customers, I think most of them closed up shop during the pandemic.
You beat our DOS 5 booting control system into a cocked hat, that a customer is running. You've got to love cough technical debt. Why on earth is "Enterprise gone awry" considered the right way to go for your IT strategy over that boring old open source bollocks that has a nasty habit of still being supported or at least working decades later? To be fair, open source wasn't a thing in the 80s for most people (nor the 90s ... ).
PDP-11s are my uncle's era and I'm 53! My first real PC was a 80286 (don't forget the 80) I bought a '287 maths co pro for about £115 so I could run a dodgy copy of AutoCAD on it. I do still have my old Commodore 64 which now has a USB interface. I assembled a ZX80 or two ...
We're actively working on moving that customer off Netware entirely. The main reason they can't get away from it is they're running a custom god program that manages the entire business, and it's tied in pretty tightly with their old configuration. The whole thing is in Delphi 7.
W.R.T. old hardware, they are actually some of the newer old boxes we support! My main line of business is keeping old industrial control systems online and reliable. On the PC side, the oldest stuff we have in 24/7 operation is 286-based. Pre-PC, we have a few customers running CNC stuff on PDP-11s. I don't know if we still have any PDP-8 customers, I think most of them closed up shop during the pandemic.