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Comment by bitwize | Hacker News Reader

A few years ago there was a story where the single Amiga that ran an entire US school district's HVAC was replaced with a system costing like 1.5 million dollars, after 30 years of dutiful service.

I can't think of examples offhand but you bet your ass there are donut shops and auto body repair services running 386s to do POS, inventory, and the like. Some of them may be driving terminals off Xenix.

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Funny thing about this is that the character-based systems of that era, whether PC-type or host+terminal type, were most of the time so much faster and more responsive than the laggy, over-animated, touchscreen trash they always replace them with in order to get big screens and prettier graphics.

The Amiga was not character-based, it ran an accelerated framebuffer (with support for scanning out multiple resolutions and color depths on a single screen).

Sorry, I was generalizing the "typical" pre-1995 system one would find in commercial installations, which in general were character-based. But I'm sure the Amiga solution would have been nice and fast too, since they were pretty powerful and programmers back then didn't feel the need to bring in PhoneGap, React, or 5,280 npm packages in order to display what amounts to a form.

RE "...A few years ago there was a story where the single Amiga that ran an entire US school district's HVAC....."

https://web.archive.org/web/20150616052358/http://www.geek.c...

From cira ..2018 ...

RE "....a system costing like 1.5 million dollars, after 30 years of dutiful service....."

I immediately wondered ... how long the new system would last or be used .... and how long it would be problem free ?

Ultimately that kind of question doesn't really matter. The only question that matters is "who will fix it when it breaks?" The Amiga system was a single machine running custom code written by one guy. If that guy dies or decides to quit maintaining it and it fails, hundreds of school kids are going to end up shivering or overheating for who knows how long. That's an unpleasant risk that may prove more costly than the $1.5mil it cost to replace it. The new system was written by a team, working at a company that specializes in this sort of thing, that has credentials proving it complies with relevant industry and safety standards, and a contract binding it to a term of service and support. That shit's worth its weight in gold to businesses and governments, even though it doesn't necessarily result in added functionality. So while it's fun to post "look at what they need to mimic a fraction of our power" memes about old systems like that, there's a reason why these are done by teams working at institutional organizations. It helps defray the risk.

In the late 90s I was interning at a place, and one of the IT guys there was old, we're talking white beard. He thought Linux was an absolute joke, and told me that the future of IT belonged to Windows NT (though it should have belonged to OS/2). The reason why is because with Linux, there was "no ass to drag onto the carpet"—no one to sue when it breaks. With Windows, the largest and most successful software company of all time was backing it up, staking their entire business on customer satisfaction. Of course, he ended up being wrong about Linux, but only because companies (mainly Red Hat) stepped up to assume the risk for big clients. That's one of the major functions of business—to provide an arm for customers to twist.

Having worked as a software configuration manager for several years ...

Yes who ever allowed it to be installed ....

Should have - before it was deployed ...

Should have got independent review of the code and documentation and available support. How maintanable to code was ? Document the dev environment , tools linkers ete etc

.... as a start

You missed a fun part of that story! The person who programmed it was a kid in the district at the time. They continued to hire him to come back and maintain it any time they had issues, which apparently was fairly rare.

And back in the 90s, before anybody knew anything about risk or "bus factor", that might've made sense. But it's no surprise that they paid a pretty penny for an actual support contract after decommissioning that system.

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