German Railway still using Win 3.11

[AGTDenton]

If you thought Vista was old, parts of the German Railway can only dream of using it...

A German railway firm posted a vacancy for a Windows 3.11 Administrator just before the weekend. In addition to skills in wrangling Windows for Workgroups on the 30-year-old operating system, the recruiter would look upon a candidate more fondly for possessing MS-DOS experience. The admin would purportedly oversee systems with 166MHz processors and a whopping 8MB of RAM. It might seem slightly worrying that modern railways are still running on such ancient systems, but mission-critical systems often adhere to the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" philosophy.

https://www.tomshardware.com/softwar...erating-system

[[GSV]Trig]

Ouch...
I could have dont that job 30 years ago, now a days, I cant remember much in the way of DOS or 3.11

[Jonj1611]

Think I remember config.sys backwards, the amount of times I had to write that with the Soundblaster settings

[AGTDenton]

I sadly missed out on the DOS days, GUI was really being pushed at school as it was making big advancements back then, and in the 90s with Microsoft pushing like mad so many GUI applications, Office, Cinemania, Encarta, Dinosaurs, Fine Artist to name but a few, command was totally ignored so I never got the chance to really learn it.
In the hype all my teachers thought command would be dead in 15 years.

I do a little bit of batch scripting today but it's nothing like it would have been back then.

[[GSV]Trig]

You didn't really 'miss out' to be fair...

[DanceswithUnix]

You didn't really 'miss out' to be fair...

Agreed, more dodged a bullet.
DOS was horrible to script in, full of stupid limitations and misfeatures. DRDos helped a little, but not much.


Linux command line is well still worth learning though. I've recently signed up with Octopus Tracker tariff where every day my electricity cost changes. Today it is 17.5455 pence/kWh, tomorrow it will be 15.6765

curl https://api.octopus.energy/v1/produc...rd-unit-rates/ | jq | less

Now I've played with that on the command line, I can knock out something to email me what tomorrow's rate is going to be every lunchtime, fired off from a cron job.

I wonder if the German railways could run an embedded Linux on those PCs, making them more reliable, secure and faster. Doing *anything* in DOS was hard, specially things like serial comms that were common back in the day and probably part of this system. Often legacy systems are maintained through fear, when if you are careful it's quite possible to bring things up to date. These days, "send this data to that display over there" is something makers do in a bored evening on a Raspberry Pi or even an ESP32 or arduino.

[[GSV]Trig]

I suspect they could, but as above, 'If it ain't broke'...
I would imagine that the cost to replace it wouldn't be cheap, and there's probably not many people that work there that know how it works, and replacing stuff like that will always bite you in the arse.

[DanceswithUnix]

... there's probably not many people that work there that know how it works,

Sadly you are probably right there, in a detail view at least.

But if you take a step back and look at the interfaces such as "That sends a net packet containing that to there" and "That sends a serial port string at 9600 baud in this format to do this then IME these things break into understandable parts quite fast. If you try and reverse engineer the details of how the current system is programmed, then that's going to bog you down real fast. Plus that detailed analysis is pointless, you are throwing that junk out.

But part of this is just me reacting because of my background. I feel my skin crawl at the mention of embedding DOS as I've only had those projects end badly. No memory protection, slow and fragile FAT filesystem, no sane device driver standards. It is broken from day one, the worry is just if modernising it would for a while make it even worse as you iron out the bugs.

[AGTDenton]

You didn't really 'miss out' to be fair...

It's more the way of thinking and fluency I'd have liked to have picked up on.
Rather than being taught the 'death of CLI'. It would have improved my use of computers much earlier on by incorporating a both can co-exist mentality.


I've always shied away from Linux because of it. Yes I can install and use Debian, Ubuntu, Cent OS because they have pretty good instructions but when things go wrong it's almost always CLI to fix the problem and rarely have I actually understood what I'm typing, I tend to execute it in good faith based on the community response.

[DanceswithUnix]

... I tend to execute it in good faith based on the community response.

I sometimes get that with things like registry key editing in Windows

In Linux you can get a long way with just the man pages. That includes a basic search that has always been there. I couldn't remember on that command line in post #6 above what the json parser utility is called, but that's fine as I don't have to remember. That's the tedious stuff computers should help with. So I type "man -k json" and got a page of json related man page titles back. I wanted a command, so that's section 1, and there is jq right in the middle. 10 seconds on the keyboard, didn't even have to reach for the mouse to open a browser tab.

Some stuff like the bash shell itself is really learning a computer language, but unlike DOS shell it's well thought out so although you need to read a few articles to get the hang of it you just need the basics to get going.

Mastering Linux command line? It's a moving target. Even with the old Unix commands, there are ways of stringing them together with pipes that old hands won't have seen. Just don't sweat it, many ways to skin a cat and you just have to find one using tools you like.

My gripe with DOS shell is hitting a wall. People tell me to install some other shell, but that's not always an option when it isn't your machine.

[Saracen999]

I suspect they could, but as above, 'If it ain't broke'...
I would imagine that the cost to replace it wouldn't be cheap, and there's probably not many people that work there that know how it works, and replacing stuff like that will always bite you in the arse.

That's my immediate reaction too.

If it's been working acceptably well all these years, there's little reason to think it won't continue to do so provided they have, or can get, compatible hardware to deal with the inevitable hardware failures.

I also wonder just how many old PCs would have to be replaced? And the cost? Ouch!

Much the same thought process, on a 'bit' smaller scale, applied to much of my computing capability here, at least, pre-retirement. I had PCs, and connected peripherals, that just did the job, had been doing it for years and, on the rare occasions I still use it, still do. Of course, even I was (and am, on those systems) still on W98, which is a smidge ever than 3.11 of WfWG.

But still, as a security risk, I wasn't going to have them net-connected. So, I run them on a little private network here with zero public connectivity, totally air-gapped. The alternative was probably going to be a load of new kit, not only PCs but A3 scanners (yes, A3) with transparency adapter, dye-sublimation printers and, well, the list goes on.

Or .... disconnect all that from the internet, and carry on with what I was doing.

Option 1 cost naff all, took 30 seconds and still works, just fine. Option 2, replacing it all, would probably have been £20k-£30k, maybe more, taken a <bleep>-load of my time and benefitted my workload .... how???

It's almost the definition of the "if it ain't broke ..." principle.

HOWEVER .... odds are that sooner or later, you'll hit a very hard wall. I had SOME spare kit. Like my server at that time .... spare mobo, CPUs (twin processor system), memory and even PSU. I had two spare identical SCSI boards, spare drive racks (3-drive thingies) and an entire set of spare SCSI hard drives to completey replace the whole RAID system. All sat in a cupboard, just in case.

But the German railways must have a VERY impressive cupboard, to do that.