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Comment by knappe | Hacker News Reader

For everyone flabbergasted by Southwest running ~Windows 3.1~ old software, I have bad news about the telecom industry. I worked at Ericsson at an R&D branch and one of the projects in the works was to move one of the main pieces of routing equipment that handled millions of telephony operatorations a day away from an ancient version of Windows.

A lot of code lives on much longer than you think. The general attitude we took was that most of the code we were writing would be running for at least 30 years. And that was the attitude at an R&D branch, arguably a side of that industry where we were working on the new tech.

Edit: Win 3.1 or something else, the point still stands. There is a lot of old software running out there that will continue to run our core services. Legacy software doesn't just mean v1 versus v2, it can mean v1 versus v41.

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>For everyone flabbergasted by Southwest running Windows 3.1

Southwest isn't running Windows 3.1, though. That's some rather lame, but predictable, truth-through-repeated-assertion thing on social media.

Not everyone uses CrowdStrike, and in this case SW was the lucky one that didn't.

Southwest does not use Windows 3.1. Why does not one read the article?

Southwest wasn't affected because they don't use Crowdstrike. That's it.

I did read the article. It links to https://www.techradar.com/pro/security/southwest-airlines-av... perhaps you might want to read it again?

Notably, crowdstrike won't run on 3.1, and thus you're kinda right.

No one runs servers with Windows 3.1. They would have used Windows NT.

The really damning bit is Windows 3.1 did not have preemptive multitasking. It barely had networking. You couldn’t run a server with it if you wanted to.

> They would have used Windows NT.

Or, at the time, OS/2

Yes and that article is wrong.

Win 3.1 or not, the point still stands. There is a lot of software out there that has been running for a really long time and will continue to do so.

Relatedly, it is nice to provide a source for your claims. I did see this [0] which would have been an appropriate thing to link

[0] https://kotaku.com/southwest-airlines-windows-3-1-blue-scree...

Dude, take the L. But for that false story being recited, you wouldn't have made that point in the first place.

> For everyone flabbergasted by Southwest running ~Windows 3.1~ old software

You said it; own it. You could have said "For everyone who was tricked by the joke that Southwest runs ~Windows 3.1~ old software" but didn't.

That is fair. I wasn't aware of the kerfuffle around whether Southwest was using 3.1 or not. I took the source and linked source at face value. It would have been nice to have had someone do more than "nope" and instead link to a reputable source. This is how you counter disinformation.

It had already been done a dozen times in the original item across multiple threads.

Good thing a lot of our banking still runs on mainframes, will never be taken out by crowdstrike

I find this more surprising, even if the Southwest & Win3.1 claims were true, I would expect most Ericsson systems to be Erlang based and thus happily chugging along on a (perhaps ancient) Linux box.

I did too. But I knew of only 1 project that was using Erlang. I have always wanted to use it.

Instead I saw a lot of MML and (happily) TCL.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MML_(programming_language)

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