> A certain nuclear power plant had a Windows NT 4.0 machine running as late as 2007.

To put this in perspective, NT 4 was released in 1996, 11 years before 2007. That’s roughly the same as someone running Windows 10 today, which a lot of people still do. The Pentium 1 was only 14 years old at most. These parts of the system shouldn’t be surprising.

The AmigaOS and software from the 80s are of course the older more interesting bits, but for critical infrastructure and safety, shouldn’t we expect and design for our hardware and software to last a long time, and not try to keep up with tech fads every decade? I feel like the main problem isn’t hardware or software that’s old, but that there wasn’t a longevity plan.

It’s always been an interesting question how to write software that will last a hundred years. Maybe with AI this is the first time in history that planning to port & upgrade to new hardware every 5-10 years seems totally reasonable.