The opposite of shopaholic: shopcell
The opposite of shopaholic: shopcell
I’ve been complaining about banks for YEARS now! I can understand in the 60s why your bank account wasn’t up to the minute accurate.
I have a debit card. I have money in the bank. Why is a $3.19 slim jim transaction pending for a week??? I tap my chip, I type my pin, transaction goes through…my bank should instantly deduct those funds, and there should never be a “pending” status. It’s all digital! What the god damn fuck?
In terms of technology, the 90s is archaic at this point. Imagine if your bank transactions had to go through a Dell running Windows 98 with a single piece of RAM measured in kb.
I’m pretty sure some parts of the US power grid are running on DOS and some of the medical system hasn’t seen a security update since Windows 2000’s end of life updates.
some parts of the US power grid are running on DOS
What’s the problem with that, though? Systems like that are pretty much guaranteed to be isolated from the internet.
There’s no need to rewrite code just because it’s old. Code doesn’t expire. If it’s still doing what it’s supposed to be doing, it’s really not as bad as people make it out to be. Windows 11 still has code from NT 3.51 in it, because that code still does its job.
What’s the problem with that, though? Systems like that are pretty much guaranteed to be isolated from the internet.
Because things break down eventually, and when it comes time to buy replacement parts you discover that they’re effectively impossible to find. Then instead of having a nice, planned transition period you’ve got like a weekend to cobble together something to get it working again.
Hardware that runs DOS well isn’t that hard to find though. There’s even new modern-ish motherboards designed for embedded systems (like robots that control production lines) that still have ISA and PCI slots to support legacy hardware, since those embedded systems are designed to last a very long time.
For what it’s worth, I know that some places that run old systems like that have virtualized it - they have much newer systems and run the old software in a VM.