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It's been my experience, in the labs I've helped with, that they tend to be using systems that are easily close to 10 years old or older.  One has DOS software from 1991 to run their microscopes, company went out of business and no one has written a new version of anything to control the scopes.  Another  package is a robot to do aliquoting of specimens coming into the lab, running on a 1989 CompuAdd system and resides on a 42MB Western Digital hard disk run by DOS 3.3!

However, I do agree where Timo in that there is a need "to consider modernizing your current framework to a more robust and compatible base".  With both of these systems, since the hardware is very aged and could fail at anytime, I'm moving them into virtual machines that should allow the systems to continue to function, regardless of the current hardware they are running on and be easily moved to another system as the virtual machine is a "compatible base" for the each system running the virtual software.

Just my approach.

-t



On Dec 21, 2007, at 9:44 AM, Steve Bogdanski wrote:

Finally ending on my initial point, if you have older equipment 8 bit
software that is not supported anymore or provided by a company  that is
long gone, it is time to consider modernizing your current framework to
a more robust and compatible base.  It is that simple.

lol... tell that to some of our faculty who are using 10+ year old systems connected to lab equipment.  The stuff works just fine and upgrades/replacements can go into the thousands and tens of thousands of dollars.  The Linear Accelerator that was purchased by the Veterinary Teaching Hospital a couple of years back was a used piece of equipment built in the 90's and one of the systems attached to it runs HP-UX v10.2 (circa 1996), you don't even want to know what that cost let alone trying to buy it brand new.

As for Windows Vista, I'd hardly call that progression.  An accurate comparison would be:

Microsoft: You should replace your current bouncy ball with our new shiny one
Customer: What's benefits does it have?  does it bounce higher?
Microsoft: Well actually no, it doesn't really bounce at all and when it does it goes in erratic directions... also it can randomly just deflate on you and we have yet to design a pump that is compatible with it so you can't re-inflate it.. yet
Customer: okay...
Microsoft: But it's shiny!


--

Stephen Bogdanski           
Network Support
College of Veterinary Medicine
Michigan State University

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Troy Murray
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Michigan State University
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