Re: (ET) Controllers

[Charlie <medievalist gmail com>]

On Sat, 14 Jun 2014, CZ Unit <cz alembic crystel com> wrote:

> It's hard to find a running 70's vintage computer, how many
> computers from the 80's are around?

Probably a lot more than you suspect.  I know of quite a few, both in
orbit and on the ground.

When the old hardware is embedded in a complex process or difficult
environment, it's too expensive to rip it out when it still works
fine.  So, there are state-of-the-art flight simulators and medical
imaging systems that run on PDP-11 computers built in the 70s and 80s,
there are hundreds of satellite and spacecraft computers that were
designed before the 90s, there's at least one VAX in orbit (don't know
if it's running Ultrix or VMS) and one of the systems currently used
to test cutting-edge nuclear cruise missiles is based on a unibus
PDP11/34.  Late 70s - early 80s tech is in lots of industrial
processes, too, although the companies that own them don't brag about
it.

--Charlie