Sounds like their system works. If that 486 hardware lasted 20 years already, seems like there's a pretty good chance it'll outlast most of the modern stuff it would be replaced with.
It was on a redundant on-line UPS as the last time it went completely off and was booted from cold, it ended up needing parts. So no, I'd say it's not likely to outlast modern replacements. Just had lots of support and organ transplants.
Systems like that ultimately end up being a resource drain, as unlike modern hardware it's not simply wandering over to a retailer and buying standard replacement parts, but sourcing used or NOS parts and hoping they work, often requiring far more time and effort by someone who could be doing some other important task.
The problem is that in open use observatories like Arecibo, a lot of equipment like that is put in place by third parties, but becomes our responsibility to maintain. But the science is important, so we maintain it as best we can.
Unlikely. Good quality 'modern stuff' has far better quality than what was available back then. Power supplies have gotten much better (and have more protections), as did motherboards with solid state capacitors. Older motherboards loved their electrolytic capacitors.
Processors had less protections. Thermal monitoring was at its infancy.
Memory sticks back then were very unreliable. As were hard drives.
Then there's just a matter of age. If it has lasted 20 years, chances are it won't last much longer.
It has probably lasted 20 years because it wasn't being powered on and off constantly. It most likely had stable power sources and - most important - a climate controlled environment with low amounts of dust.
Processors had less protections, and thermal monitoring was at its infancy because almost all the 486s wouldn't use enough power to cook themselves to death, even with passive heatsinks.
I don't know about memory sticks and hard drives from that period. It's quite possible they've replaced the hard drive with compact flash or something too, which should be pretty reliable given they apparently only make a floppy disk's worth of data every day.
It's why computers from the 80s can last until now without needing any recapping but computers from 2002 or so are ticking time bombs.
That being said, electrolytics were somewhat less common than they are now. But the Capacitor Plague is not the only reason electronics are recapped, especially older/vintage/retro electronics.
About 1 one year later it underwent my cleaning routine, vacuuming dust out, cleaning the fans, etc. I took the cpu-cooler off to check for bad thermal grease and discovered it had none at all! No pad either, someone just clipped that thing on, and instead of direct contact it had a small airgap which you could look through from the sides.
Unbelievable.
When I got it, it must have been in use for years already!
A 486 doesn't even need a heatsink, it's passively cooled and perfectly fine with that, as software of the time (mainly DOS) didn't even "idle" the CPU --- it was drawing full power all the time.
That also means if you manage to boot DOS or similar era software on a modern machine (especially a laptop) that was designed to have the CPU idled for most of its life, it is likely to go into thermal throttling immediately.
I don't know if the VM changes anything, but it definitely seems as though it does not halt while waiting for activity.
Surely it does make some sense, but think about the hardware suddenly breaking down and not finding what to replace it with. Even with spare parts it could be a pain as the old generation retires
It can be tricky. I had to work with something like this a few years ago and managed. As I remember I had to get Scitech Display Doctor/Univbe from some abandonware sites to make use of the weird onboard VGA under Windown95. The ISA-card for the CNC-machine worked, it used DMA, among other things. It all worked, and was even more fluid to operate/program.
The cost was just over 400EUR. (for the board)
Anyways, it's industrial, the formfactor often does not fit existing cases and backpanels, but it's doable. More so than hunting ebay or similar for spares of dubious provenance.
Only exception would be if the "App" and the board/card were designed so sloppily that they really only run on exactly that same hardware.
I wonder if an unpatched Win95 box is actually safer than an unpatched modern Windows box.
You'd be surprised how much malware is "legacy" 32-bit and works without issue on WinXP. A lot of malware even shies away from Unicode API's and specifically calls out the *A Win32 API functions.
Considering the Win32 API is backwards compatible to a fault, I don't see why modern malware couldn't absolutely wreck a Win9x box.
I work on software that still supports XP with only a little pain. Visual Studio 2019 will still install the necessary toolchain if you ask nicely. Targeting Windows 95/98 in 2020 sounds like a nightmare.
Could I get a link to how to do this and/or web search terms? Is this just something targeting visual C runtime 20xx or older?
The data is copied off daily via floppy (don't get me started...) and is backed up on local network shares. The specifics of that weren't in my need-to-know and was managed by the IT group.
The system was essentially stateless, so spinning it up from the image wasn't an issue, but the PC itself is essentially part of the "equipment", as it ran the custom drivers and it was specifically designed for that PC and a one-of-a-kind ISA card.