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Comment by teo_zero | Hacker News Reader

I've read the article and the comments with interest. I just have a question: if Windows ABI is so stable that 20-year-old programs are guaranteed to run, why are there computers with Win95 or NT that nobody dares touching lest some specific software stops working? I see plenty of these in industrial environments, but also in public libraries, corporate databases, etc.

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In practice most of those machines are an environment in and of themselves. It’s not that they can’t be upgraded, it’s that they likely couldn’t even be rebuilt if they had a hardware failure. The risk they’re taking is that the system is more likely to break due to being touched than it is to suffer a hardware failure. Which as most of us can attest to, is true until it’s not.

Relatedly, at a previous job we ran an absolutely ancient piece of software that was critical to our dev workflow. The machine had an issue of some sort, so someone imaged the hard drive, booted it as a VM and we resumed business as usual. Last I heard it was still running untouched, and unmaintained.

> if Windows ABI is so stable that 20-year-old programs are guaranteed to run

That's not actually true; there are no guarantees. Microsoft does a best effort to ensure the majority of applications continue to work. But there are billions of applications, they're not all going to work. Many applications don't even adhere to the Win32 API properly. Microsoft will sometimes, if the app is important enough, ensure even misbehaving applications work properly.

I know in my use case all these ancient machines are nessessary for interacting with some ancient hardware, not a case where wine is particularly useful.

This is usually about drivers, not applications. The Windows driver model didn’t maintain long-term compatibility.

why touch it? these are usually not directly connected to the internet. some possibly virtualized. "updating" to use wine on linux is a ton of work on its own, you will run into unforseeable issues. nobody wants to pay for that and nobody wants to be responsible for the problems when the net benefit is zero. but a real update/replacement of all these systems is too expensive, hence the status quo.

Because they just work. Nobody cares if their MRI machine runs Win2000, they care if the machine reveals brain cancer.

They care to a certain degree, and that degree is the size of the carefully-tuned payment that Trend Micro extract for the firewall product that lets the Windows 2000 MRI machine safely co-exist on the network with the hospital DC.

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