God, why!?
The manufacturer had long abandoned the equipment and no alternative software was available.
The equipment would cost millions to replace and what they had apparently worked great. So the 386 chugged along.
I don’t buy this. Worst case scenario, the microscope talks to the PC using a proprietary hardware interface (say, an ISA card). It would cost far less than millions to hire a competent electronics engineer to reverse engineer the ISA card and the driver that talks to the ISA card, and fabricate a modern interface. Best case scenario, the microscope talks to the PC via a standard interface, and would be even cheaper to reverse, since you’d just need to worry about the software layer.
On the other hand, it would truly cost millions when the aforementioned ancient interface inevitably breaks and becomes impossible to reverse engineer, necessitating purchase of a brand new microscope.
>what they had apparently worked great
This is the real reason: because the scope works fine right now, nobody thought it prudent to invest the tens of thousands it would take to future-proof it. Exactly like companies that prioritize short-term profits over long-term success.
So now the department is down 100k for a hack. Does the hack even work? Probably not. The "engineer" probable over sold himself and got hired anyway because of the talent shortage.
So the uni is down $100k, the system chugs along with Win3.1 just fine, and every research group understand that when it finally breaks they'll all have to pitch in for a new one.
Btw, as to your comment on this department's myopia, the university is top 10. The department is top 5 world wide.
It seems disingenuous to assume the absolute worst case scenario is what will inevitably happen. The best case scenario is equally likely IMO: a reverse engineering genius undergrad will create a robust modern interface as part of a summer research project in the lab.
>Btw, as to your comment on this department's myopia, the university is top 10. The department is top 5 world wide.
That’s an appeal to authority fallacy. Just because you’re top 10 or top 5 or number one doesn’t make you immune to mistakes. Meta and Google are both at the top of their respective industries but make boneheaded decisions all the time.
If expensive essential apparatus you don’t have is available off the shelf, you buy it or go home.
If expensive essential apparatus you already have needs floppy disks or serial ports or twinax or a green screen terminal and a dot matrix printer or Indigo2 Maximum Impact with a black box hanging off the scsi port or whatever, you have a tech keep that shit running. If it breaks and would require serious PI time to manage reverse engineering and replacing components, you buy new apparatus if it exists to be bought!!! That’s what you do, or you get steamrolled by other labs that are doing research instead of running an equipment nostalgia club.
And the sensible way of keeping mission-critical legacy hardware running is to emulate everything that can be emulated using modern, interchangeable parts. An SD-card-based floppy drive emulator will be a lot more reliable than a decades-old combination of physical drive + floppies. An entire DOS or Windows 3.x computer can likely be replaced by modern industrial systems (also popular in the retro community) that reimplement i586 in SoC form.
My "appeal to authority" was in response to this comment - this department has proven its ability to manage its affairs for far longer than the lifespan of the software running their equipment.
Windows 3.1 came out in the early 90s (late 80s?). How often have the driver APIs, the electrical buses, etc changed since? Should the department have bought new equipment at every change to be "up to date"?
This department did the right thing. They invested in other equipment and kept a couple thousand dollars of spares on hand.
I'd say if if you cannot replicate the system it's already time for some investment. But even before that people should have the foresight to keep systems up-to-date or at least bridged to contemporary systems.
And then, god knows if the device driver for the Ethernet card can coexist with all the other drivers and TSRs, or even if it's running a mainstream version of DOS. Maybe it has a DOS Extender that makes something fail in a non-obvious way.
Adding hardware to Old PCs isn't what you're accustomed to.