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Comment by sandworm101 | Hacker News Reader

Don't single out McLaren. Countless much more important systems can only be accessed through ancient tech. The Stealth bomber (the b-2) is a product of the same technological era as the F1. Would anyone here be surprised if the new ran a story about them being grounded because that one last laptop capable of talking to their systems finally gave up the DOS ghost?

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I was not surprised when the news ran a story[0] around two years ago about the B-2 bombers getting computer soft- and hardware upgrades.

> “We’re re-hosting the flight management control processors, the brains of the airplane, onto a much more capable integrated processing unit. We’re lying in some new fiber optic cable as opposed to the mix bus cable we are using right now. The B-2’s computers from the 80s are getting maxed out and overloaded with data,” Single said.[0]

[0] http://www.dodbuzz.com/2014/06/25/b-2-bomber-set-to-receive-...

Ya, but what's the air conditioner running on? Flight management is the shiny end of things. How does the mechanic on the ground talk to the hydraulic system to perform a check?

There is an entire programming language called ATLAS that still runs on a lot of different computers. I assume the hydraulics could be tested with that.

If only the writers [0] of Silicon Valley had experience with the software for ground support equipment on aircraft like the F/A-18.

Actually, most of the F-22s still use i960MX [1] processors and I've heard funny stories about the techs raiding old laser printers to find spare chips for the ground diagnostic equipment.

[0] http://www.wired.com/2014/04/mike-judge-silicon-valley/

[1] http://www.militaryaerospace.com/articles/print/volume-12/is...

I guess I'd expect that it could be virtualized. Or, at the very least, that the hardware-specific API was somewhat-generalized or at least generalizable, so that it could be updated or used via a VM with a similar (even if dated) piece of hardware. Is it a lack of familiarity and developers for the code, or is it just not well-engineered?

At those dollar amounts, it seems like any proven-solved "problem" is solvable again, likely "easier" due to the technology improvements...

Ha!

This stuff is old enough it might need real mode with the A20 gate. Intel, in a rare fit of backwards incompatibility, removed the A20 gate a while back. EPT might be able to emulate it, but that assumes a hypervisor author tried.

And how are you going to plug that bespoke adapter into a modern system? CardBus? EISA? Who knows?

Yeah i recall reading about some particle sensor at a university lab that was running on some ancient DOS beast because anything newer would throw some timings off.

Never mind that the manufacturer was long gone, new sensor would be expensive, and the lab would have to suspend all experiments up to a year while running a series of baseline stuff to align old and new results.

I had to buy a very old laptop because the software for configuring Motorola sabers depended on the cpu for timing communication with the radio during the flash process. People have bricked their radios trying to emulate old clock speeds. I'd hope that they'd have a more robust protocol in expensive aerospace platforms, but I wouldn't be surprised if that wasn't the case.

In these days, a proper API would have been a .sys driver loaded in config.sys, or a TSR (terminate but stay resident) program leaving some routines in memory, hooking a software interrupt as the entry point.

The (even then) ancient laboratory equipment I used in the 2000s, and often moved to more modern machines, never did this. It was all monolithic applications directly talking to parallel ports (port read/write to 0x378) or to memory mapped on the ISA bus. On the other hand, most stuff came with schematics, and from this most of the logic (short of a few PALs with blindingly obvious functionality) could be deduced. It all was quite simple stuff.

But as long as hardware is still available (as are the Compaq computers in the article) investing the time isn't worth it. Would I have to do this today, I'd probably run the applications in DOSbox, add a emulation of the old hardware to the emulator, and pass the commands via USB or Network to a FTDI USB to something chip. Or to a BeagleBone/Raspberry/... with its GPIOs connected to the real hardware (mind the 5V levels).

Unrelated to software running on old PCs, here's a guy who replaces the old CPU in the lab equipment with an embedded board running an emulated version of the original software:

http://www.jks.com/5370/5370.html

Do you seriously think virtualisation was a thing in the 1980s when the B-2 was being designed and built? It wasn't even a thing when the F-35 was being designed and initially built.

It will be single-threaded apps running natively and talking directly to various bus adapters.

The most advanced processor available to them was a M68020, maybe. Multi-tasking was still hard, Linux and Windows 3.0 were still a decade away when the systems engineers were designing the B-2.

And that's assuming they were able to change the hardware platform in the 1980s - the designs would have been drawn up in the 1970s.

There is absolutely no way on Earth that anybody would have thought "what we need here is a VM". I'd be amazed if it even had a Hardware Abstraction Layer, and that had a bit of historical form, albeit not in real-time operating systems yet.

The '020 was Popek-Goldberg compliant at least! Good chip.

It certainly was a thing in the 80s, IBM was selling it in the late 60s. [0]

I don't know how difficult it would have been to put in an airframe though... I'm guessing: very.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_machines#History

The first commercial computers were not PCs. You sound like you don't know anything about the history of computing. Almost every system technology we use was invented in the 60s and 70s.

You think they were sticking mainframes into the B-2?

You should write an article about the B-2, I think that would be great.

Why can't such systems use emulators?

Because you can't emulate the physical interface, you need to build an actual one. And if it has some custom ASIC in it, you're SOL.

Yeah, but it's from 1992. I wouldn't be surprised if it could be bit-banged with an arduino.

But you'd have to know what it does for all possible states.

Not impossible but non-trivial.

They are the kind of people that could have an ASIC ground down and reverse engineered. Non-trivial.

They have extremely skilled engineers and lots of money.

Well being that this is a connector, from 1992, I have strong doubts that it is anything complicated.

And you only have to know the states/transformations being used. Easily scoped.

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