On Tue, 15 Oct 2013, Julien Goodwin wrote:
On 15/10/13 17:13, Lev Lafayette wrote:
On Tue, October 15, 2013 4:46 pm, Petros wrote:
http://www.theage.com.au/technology/technology-news/30yearold-railway-comput...
1982.. 1982? What do they use here?
I've heard constant rumours of a PDP-11 :)
I've been told they're VAXen, although if they run VMS the hardware could now be Alphas or Itanics. (RIP VMS)
A former colleague went to work for the company that does some of this kit, according to him one of the problems they had was the staff/union refusing to accept any change in UI so they needed to develop a text-based UI that was identical to the old systems, including for the visualisations.
Bah. Unions. Oooh, change is scary, let's ban change! You missed the talk I gave at LUV a couple of years ago about the observatory replacing the 8-year-older Telescope Control System with the Interdata model 70 (by the time it was decomissioned, there were about 6 other almost-complete model 70s in storage downstairs to replace bits of the production machine as they caught fire). The last upgrades done to that machine was a couple of decades before it was retired, where VAXen were installed to talk to the model 70 over its custom CAMAC link (shared memory, essentially, IIRC), and real computers talked to the VAXen over TCP/IP. Or a crate on the floor with cables dangling out of it talked directly to the shared memory and 10mbit TCP/IP out the other end. There had been a serious problem in the last decade of its life where its harddisks and memory were simply maxed out. No custom FPGA interfaces to those guys when there's only 1 person left on the planet who understands it, and he shuns fancy new techniques like FPGAs. We had a smaller staff to contend with, but everyone *loved* the fact that we were replacing a large amount of the computery bits and simplifying the hardware interface in the console. 35 year old buttons are not reliable buttons. I would have thought the union men would have been caring about safety and things working more than protecting their patch. Probably scared the new system will be too easy to operate. -- Tim Connors