Internet Explorer shutdown to cause Japan headaches 'for months'

I never saw any commercial from firefox.

Basically there were 2 options: IE and the mozilla suite. The last one was so bloated that almost nobody used it.

Then some people decided to cut the fat, and threw everything except the browser away. The result was phoenix, a browser rising from the netscape ashes. It got renamed to firebord and then firefox, after name clashes with existing software. Mozilla took notice, and refocused away from the suite and to firefox. Apart from a serious downsizing, firefox got features like not being infectable by activex, being a bit faster than IE, and the killer feature: Tabs.

And that was enough. Every techy saw a better browser, and firefox spread by word of mouth. Every techy who was sick enough of malware hunting installed firefox at friends and family, with the treat that free support would evaporate if IE came back.

Meanwhile microsoft loudly proclaimed IE fast enough, malware problems with activeX and toolbars nonexistent, and tabs as too advanced for the average XP user.

There were hard battles fought in the enterprise. The average corporate intranet was taped together with activex, and firefox was the heathen that ignored the holy group policies. Besides, microsoft had a very succesfull campaign repurposing enterprise windows admin and dev staff to just say no to open source and laugh it out of the network.

Meanwhile, the average corporate underling had a better browser at home for free, and the internet slowly became unusable in IE. In the end, the end users won over their atrofied IT departments, but a lot of gnashing of teeth happened in the process.

Often the use case to connect such a controller is getting telemetry data from the machine. Not for waste sorting, but we have a machine to solder some parts and puts information about the items in a text file. It also runs an old Windows OS. The usual route to get process information is through a network share but the system only speaks smb1. Since we banned that protocol we now need to retrofit a small software application that just writes the data into a database. The device gets its own network segment and firewall rules and all but it still isn't completely air-gapped.

All that for basically a counter on how many parts it soldered so that we have an idea about how many parts we have in storage.

I think these decisions to use an old OS are mostly done because it was used for decades. Modern OS still know how to talk with serial ports. These connectors are still standard because they are much more reliable than USB for example, especially over larger distances. They are in use for any form a data that isn't audiovisual, where you need far more bandwidth.

Internal networks don't count