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Comment by sbaiddn | Hacker News Reader

Lets say it costs 100k to reverse engineer a card, drivers, and software (I doubt it will stay on budget, I see how the software industry operates. The Uni will probably get hooked on SaS contract)

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.

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>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.

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.

In the realm of top-tier laboratories:

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.

> you have a tech keep that shit running

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.

But at the same time, invoking the appeal to authority fallacy doesn't allow you to disqualify anything that you label with it.

"because the scope works fine right now, nobody thought it prudent to invest the tens of thousands it would take to future-proof it."

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.

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