Certs, legacy technology, & the DMV

Vogon Poet

For those who are wondering why some certs throw in questions about legacy technology and its relevance to your cert, I thought I would share this information. I was at the NY DMV yesterday and the nice lady behind the desk was a little slow with her new touch screen monitor. I was told that they had added them this week, and that they had a lot of great options that would help the employees with processing renewals/applications/etc. Despite the new advanced interface, I noticed that they were still using Windows NT on all of the stations.
Now you know why you get those questions. You might work for the DMV some day.

stlsmoore

I actually dealt with a client today who relies heavily on NT Servers and Window 98 client machines still and has no plans of upgrading anytime soon.

blargoe

The job I left a couple years ago was using Windows 95 on the production line at a couple of their factories.

Goldmember

My hair salon uses DOS 5.0 and dot matrix printer

JDMurray

A few years ago I worked for a company that still relied heavily on the Pick operating system running on very old PCs. Known mostly for its database system, the Pick system saw its heyday on the PC between 1984-1994. The unique design of the database system practically guarantees that any software written for Pick could never be ported to any other DBMS.

Schluep

We have some old Stratus mainframes running VOS still. All of the programs are written in FORTRAN or VOS C since they are the only working compilers on it at this time. This is of course in addition to the hundreds of command macros in use. We have three programmers that write entirely in FORTRAN for it. A number of databases are maintained on it for one of our Call Centers due to the 99.9999% fault tolerance that has been maintained and the concern for "If it isn't broke don't fix it". We also have a number of very old Unix servers that cannot be updated due to legacy software which breaks if we try. This is all in addition to our more modern stuff not worth mentioning.

Mishra

Mark "Alpha OpenVMS server" for me.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlphaServer

blargoe

Same company I mentioned before

Their entire transportation system (this is a major textile manufacturer in the southern US) is running off of two HP Vecrta PC's on DOS 6 using an application that was written for Netware 3.x. The network, computers and application do not support TCP/IP at all.

JDMurray

Mishra wrote:

Mark "Alpha OpenVMS server" for me.

Nice! It's been a while since I've thought of Alpha processors. I do know a very large health care organization that still uses OpenVMS, but not on Alphas.