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Comment by comprev | Hacker News Reader

I once did a project which involved migrating an ancient (early 1980s) DOS based application to FreeDOS via a VMWare host. The application controlled an oven in a soft drinks bottling factory and due to EMI, the physical disk had to be cloned every 6-9months to avoid corruption, and sourcing ancient IDE drives was problematic.

The manufacturer was happy to provide updated software, but only alongside a new oven, at a cost of £1 million.

The factory had 4 ovens.

VMWare + Windows 7 + SSDs + proper Siemens industrial PC = much cheaper hack!

Definitely a cool feeling knowing the solution might be in place another 20-30 years :-)

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What kind of PC is an industrial PC? More hardened? More resistant to factory floor accidents?

I don’t work in the field, but I was curious too and found the Siemens product offerings: https://new.siemens.com/global/en/products/automation/pc-bas...

Looks like they’re hardened to run continuously, reduce potential causes for maintenance, resist vibrations, and run in ambient temperatures up to 55ºC. You can also find variants certified for use in marine shipping scenarios.

Industrial PCs are also commonly passively cooled and more or less sealed, using the case itself as a heatsink and protecting the electronics inside from airborne contaminants.

Individual components can also be industrial or automotive grade rather than commercial grade; for example, industrial-grade SSDs are usually rated for 85°C and often have much higher write endurance ratings than client/consumer SSDs, and may also be protected with a conformal coating or epoxy potting across the entire board.

Also a barebones industrial PC can be 3X more expensive than a common one.

The cost of that PC failing can easily be 1000x more than a common one, so it's worth it.

This is correct. The hardware is built and tested to be run in the most horrible conditions. Their support is often top notch too for when the equipment breaks down.

Think of them like "rugged laptops" but for PCs / servers.

They also tend to have lots of legacy IO and expansion slots. Like 8 bit ISA slots on modern hardware.

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