Ask HN: Who's still keeping a DOS machine up because the business depends on it?

A few years ago, I helped repair a broken USB port, on a USB-floppy emulator...

...which was so the operators could sneakernet their NC tape files into an IBM PC 5150 that thought it was talking to a floppy drive, of course...

...which hosted an ISA card that emulated the punch-tape reader that the NC lathe had originally been designed with.

The NC lathe hadn't missed a beat in 50+ years, why mess with what works?

Perhaps look into environmental services labs that do contract EPA work. I would not be surprised to see entire HP-Agilent(ISA-carded) - (think liquid chromotography analyzers) fleets that would match what you're looking for.

I've seen some older retail stores use DOS machines, ones where the owners are 70+. They just don't have a reason to upgrade what they're used to.

You're trying to create and sell a version of dos box? These companies have not replaced their computers because to the user there is no separation between the computer and the machine it controls. So the computer will be updated along with the equipment, which is not connected to the internet or a network anyways so it's not a cybersecurity risk. For the user, if it runs fine, there's no need to update just the computer, and the computer is updated along with the machine

In other words, these are embedded systems.

Not recently but when I was a teenager (2001-ish) my supermarket was using a DOS computer to handle stock, print new labels when prices updated each day, etc.

It's not DOS but my private school still uses an IBM 5100 to do payroll and record attendance.

Still have a liquid scintillation counter running on DOS with raw data printed on a dot matrix

This is probably a wrong audience. Most people here are very technical - the kind that would not put up with tiptoeing around a sacred computer from decades ago running some magic software from the DOS era. This crowd will aggressively move it to modernized architecture or at least emulate it using a more modern platform.

The company I worked at in the late nineties, used Managing Your Money (MYM) for bookkeeping - initially on a dedicated DOS machine. My colleague set up a DOSEMU-based emulator and moved the software to it (bye-bye, dedicated DOS machine!). Later, he re-wrote it in STk (Scheme w/ Tk bindings, running natively in Linux) as ageneral-purpose transaction storage. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Until recently several customers have an industrial machine that boots DOS. I think the oldest effort we deal with is Win XP now. I do have a C>64 at home ...

In a world that requires security audits etc here's some notes that might help:

Scenarios: You have a device that only talks NetBIOS or even NetBEUI for file sharing. You need to get files to and from it and your CAD workstations run Windows 11 and anything less than SMB 3, with signing and sealing and all that jazz is laughable.

... Devices requiring ftp, telnet, serial over carrier pidgeon

Solution options:

Networking: The first job is to segregate your industrial gear from your general network and you might want to create two or more industrial gear and internet of things type networks with differing access policies. Start with one for now, you can improve it later.

You use 801.1Q VLANS logically or physically (why the hell did I want to write literally?) separate via separate switches.

Please do not skimp on this step. Buy a network bod to sort it out or put your IT bod on a course or hopefully they will have labbed this up at home already!

Comms: Samba is bloody wonderful and speaks everything that MS has ever done and deprecated. Even Samba does need to be asked to start speaking some of those dialects again but it will.

Put a Linux (other Unices are available) box on the same VLAN as your machines. You will need to set quite a few options relating to the minimum version for its server version. When talking to the machines, Samba is the server and when talking to your file server, Samba is the client.

Create a data share on a Windows box on the corp LAN. For example it might be on a file server for multiple access or just a single CAD PC.

Get the Samba box to mount that share to itself at say /srv/data_share_mc1

Now get the Samba box to create a share from /srv/data_share_mc1 which it calls DAT_MC1 (8.3 chars for NetBIOS)

With luck, you should be able to map DAT_MC1 on your machine.

Few years ago I was working for a F500 company and during an assessment we discovered couple of OS/2 Warp machines that were controlling CNC equipment

I've stumbled upon DOS on the LCD screen of the otherwise seemingly modern gas station.

I know of some laboratories where they have a host of old machines for software to support some critical instruments that only runs off a dongle or an ISA card and it still does accurate work.

Not DOS, but my company has a Windows XP machine with a dialup connection that I have to keep running for obtuse legal reasons.

If it goes down, the company gets fined. It happened in the gap between my predecessor leaving, and me being hired.

I virtualized a bunch and they seem to work well. At one point, I even had Ultima running on one. =D

It’s gone now, but we used to have a random OS/2 box well past the point where that was extremely weird.

Not now, but few years ago I worked on a toll that runs DOS because… yes.

Also worked ~2014 DOS slot machines - in next year we ported to Linux

I used to be doing that, but this was a bit over a decade ago at this point. There was an SBC with DOS on a chip that connected to Novell Netware. I set a few variables in autoexec.bat, let it connect to the network drive, then had it run a script from there to admin them / do backups (by which I mean xcopy the C: drive).

These were for some industrial CNC machines with a poorly version-controlled app (send us the single-file .c for the program, we'll make changes & recompile for you, then send back a new .c and .exe file) that would just malloc() all the memory on the machine for a million element array instead of tracking the 1k or so unit IDs a more efficient way. They were six digits long, it worked... mostly.

I kept a 3.5 floppy with the contents of sys a: that I used to run sys c: after restoring a machine from backup in my office.

EDIT: oh, and of course by "restoring from backup" I mean reversing the xcopy to copy everything from the network drive's copy back to C:

EDIT2: My memory is going, they didn't use malloc() at all, anywhere in the programs, they just had a static million element array.

Not current and not DOS... but years ago, around 2011, I helped set up a series of QEMU emulators running DEC Ultrix and MIPS Unix software that called out and retrieved data from weather stations only reachable by modem. The software had been written years prior in C and nobody had the source.

The box running the QEMU emulators had a bunch of old US Robotics modems hanging off it via USB serial dongles.

>Anything with a parallel port dongle?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46849567

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In the AI era, can’t we just release a new version of DOS?