I met a company that still has a machine in their production line, that uses 5.25" floppy discs and an amber monochrome display. “Why?” I hear you ask. Because it still works, it isn’t networked, and the floppies next to it are the only ones it’ll ever interact with.
If you think about it though, it is actually easier to find replacement parts for 70s-90s systems because there is now a small industry around it as well as collectors and there was a differrnt culture around it.
Replacing things from 2000s-2010s systems is the bigger issues. They were all taken over by giant corpos with all repair parts, manuals, and software restricted and hidden in the name of “profit” and “protecting corporate IP” and now it is not profitable enough for them to spend resources keeping stock of old parts or driver installers, so into the trash they go, never to be able to be seen again, and reproducing them also is note challenging with increasing system complexity.
The difference is that you can use new parts in computers from 2010s. You can also replace them easily without much difficulty, as the standards haven’t really changed that much.
But computers from the 80s and 90s are not compatible with modern platforms. Standards have changed, and new hardware thar uses standards like 32-bit PCI, ISA, MCA (for expansion cards), IDE are no longer manufactured. Even the CPU architecture had big changes between early x86 CPUs.
I met a company that still has a machine in their production line, that uses 5.25" floppy discs and an amber monochrome display. “Why?” I hear you ask. Because it still works, it isn’t networked, and the floppies next to it are the only ones it’ll ever interact with.
The biggest problem with these dinosaurs is when they stop working. Sourcing parts is getting more difficult.
If you think about it though, it is actually easier to find replacement parts for 70s-90s systems because there is now a small industry around it as well as collectors and there was a differrnt culture around it.
Replacing things from 2000s-2010s systems is the bigger issues. They were all taken over by giant corpos with all repair parts, manuals, and software restricted and hidden in the name of “profit” and “protecting corporate IP” and now it is not profitable enough for them to spend resources keeping stock of old parts or driver installers, so into the trash they go, never to be able to be seen again, and reproducing them also is note challenging with increasing system complexity.
The difference is that you can use new parts in computers from 2010s. You can also replace them easily without much difficulty, as the standards haven’t really changed that much.
But computers from the 80s and 90s are not compatible with modern platforms. Standards have changed, and new hardware thar uses standards like 32-bit PCI, ISA, MCA (for expansion cards), IDE are no longer manufactured. Even the CPU architecture had big changes between early x86 CPUs.