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Comment by PietdeVries | Hacker News Reader

And the downside: you will only have a few technicians that really understand how things work, hiring new ones is next to impossible as teenagers have never seen neither the hardware nor the software that is running on it. It scales terrible to new locations. I recall a few years ago NASA was looking for 286-processors for the Space Shuttle. I cannot imagine your spacecraft is getting safer because of outdated hardware.()
Then again, armies are known to prepare for the previous war. In WW-1 they used trenches and then came the machine-gun and the gas. In WW-2 all soldiers were prepared against gas, the French dug the Maginot line and the Germans just skipped around. Now we have amazing tanks but the next war is online...

() I have to correct myself: NASA was looking for 8086 chips in 2001 - not 286 chips a few years ago. https://www.geek.com/chips/nasa-needs-8086-chips-549867/

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Since human knowledge isn't passed down through genetics, people generally don't know about something, until they have worked with it. That's what education is for, whether it's on their own or formally in a class room. I assume anyone being groomed for these positions, learns it like any other trade.

Yes, but you'd rather not have to train at all for these positions, and have a robust hiring pool of people who already have training because that training is applicable to a wide range of jobs.

You're also less likely to be able to find people willing to train in something they know is obsolete and will have no utility outside the job at hand, which means you have to spend more money to find and train these people.

I guess all this is less of a problem in the military, where you do as you're told, but still.

We teach them every detail of everything they need to know in their technical school when they come into the military.

Old equipment is actually interesting to work on -- difficult, but interesting. It's also very valuable for understanding modern hardware at a deep level that isn't often taught anymore.

How many people do you know who have actually replaced and aligned the heads on a UYH-3 or run end to end tests on serial data channels that traverse thousands of feet and multiple switchboards from a UYK-43?

> How many people do you know who have actually replaced and aligned the heads on a UYH-3 or run end to end tests on serial data channels that traverse thousands of feet and multiple switchboards from a UYK-43?

I think that's interesting and valuable on its own from an academic/research/nostalgia perspective, but not when we're talking about maintaining systems critical to the functioning of a nuclear weapons arsenal.

Perhaps you're responding to a different discussion?

Read my comment in context and it will become quite clear.

UYK-7 maintenance... fault code lists and swap cards... love those days underway.

I missed the UYK-7 by a couple of years. But I lived the 43 and Q-21 for years.

Older technology is probably much simpler though. It might actually be possible to train someone, or for that someone to learn from a manual.

Whenever I want to be depressed about the loss of human knowledge, I think about how no one will know how to build a VCR, or all the "hacks" and things that were needed to get it working. I'm sure they'll understand the concepts very well. It will be "simple" physics because it was discovered first (Like how a HDD uses earlier physics than a SSD).

But then I think of all the amazing people (that are on youtube) who restore old technology, and build replicas, etc, and I feel okay again about human knowledge.

But I think it is possible that as time goes on, knowledge about these systems can get lost, even if they're simpler to understand.

I imagine there's more than one way to build a "VCR" or a thing that replicates its purpose: to read magnetic tape.

As long as there's engineers, there will be hope ;)

Hiring people experienced with floppies isn't harder than hiring people experienced with nuclear weapons.

The difficulty in finding people with experience with nuclear weapons is inherent to the task.

The difficulty in finding people experienced with floppies is a choice made, a burden taken on due to a lack of willingness to use more-current technology.

Not saying bleeding-edge whiz-bang tech is a great idea for nuclear weapons control and comms systems, but when it's hard to source parts, and hiring new people usually requires extensive training on technology they've never seen before and will never see again, that's a problem.

They must have either bought too many or excessed some chips that didn't test perfect, because when I did my NASA internship around 2007-08 an electronic's surplus store in Houston had boxes of 8086 chips, 8088's as well. I still have a couple I bought with the intention of making some hobby SBC's (single board computers).

> I cannot imagine your spacecraft is getting safer because of outdated hardware.()

Given the possibility of hardware bugs; eg FOOF, Intel dev bug, outdated hardware is well tested hardware, and as such, is arguably safer than newer, less-well tested hardware.

I doubt there's a material difference in well-testedness in hardware from the 70s/80s vs hardware from, say, the early 00s. Certainly, don't incorporate brand new off-the-shelf commercial hardware designed in 2019 for such a task, but a 15-20 year lag should give you similar (if not better) reliability than a 30-40 year lag.

It's the military. They don't need people with experience. They'll train as many as they need.

Any technically competent person can get up to speed on old tech in pretty short order. Many people do it as a hobby. There's a heck of a lot less "stuff" you need to understand to work with it.

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