floofloofSony Shuts Down Nearly Its Entire Memory Card Business Due to SSD Shortage
This isn’t sustainable. Almost all of our infrastructure runs on computers and eventually it will reach a point where you have a computer in charge of vital infrastructure that won’t be able to buy replacement part and it’ll just fail.
SamskaraThere‘s existing infrastructure, that runs on hardware from the 1980s. Especially in industrial applications there are still plenty of gigantic machines controlled by a 386 or a C-64.
The used vintage market can keep these running for a long time. Eventually you replace them with an emulator or an FPGA that runs the same software.
Big banking, insurance, airlines, shipping, governments, militaries bought huge IBM mainframes from the 1960s onwards. They ran for decades. Many of these were transformed into virtual machines, still running their ancient FORTRAN code.
There’s also the story of (IIRC Minutemen) nuclear missiles needing 5.25 floppies to program their guidance systems. These were still operational in the early 2000s. Lots of military weapons systems run on ancient hardware.
Banks, insurance, and aviation all run on very well-tested established code, and are very, very resistant to change.
But people who know cobol and fortran are getting fewer and further between, so they are slowly changing. Fortunately with modern software development practices, you can much more easily write verified software.