German Railway Company Is Looking For MS-DOS and Windows 3.11 Admin (tomshardware.com) 199
New submitter betso.net shares a report: A German railway firm posted a vacancy for a Windows 3.11 Administrator just before the weekend. In addition to skills in wrangling Windows for Workgroups on the 30-year-old operating system, the recruiter would look upon a candidate more fondly for possessing MS-DOS experience. The admin would purportedly oversee systems with 166MHz processors and a whopping 8MB of RAM. It might seem slightly worrying that modern railways are still running on such ancient systems, but mission-critical systems often adhere to the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" philosophy.
MS-DOS and Windows 3.11 Admin (Score:4, Funny)
They should be adversing for a digital archaeologist.
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Re:MS-DOS and Windows 3.11 Admin (Score:4, Insightful)
I still have an ms-dos 1.0 floppy. I wrote menu driven autoexec.bat and config.sys files to load different sets of drivers for different purposes. I had 636k free on 640k msdos 7 systems. I'm super qualified for this job and wouldn't do that crazy shit for any amount of money. Who would?
They should upgrade to Linux or modern windows and be done with it.
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Certifying a new dashboard display for an old but still working locomotive will probably be more expensive than the residual value of the total rolling stock of the same locomotive type.
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You can buy an MS-DOS laptop with an 8088 CPU on Amazon for $200.
Retro 8088 CPU XT PC Laptop Computer [amazon.com]
It has an RS-232 serial port, a DB-25 parallel port, and a CGA graphics card. What else do you need?
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A psychiatric examination?
Re:MS-DOS and Windows 3.11 Admin (Score:5, Interesting)
Many old programs bit-banged the hardware using software loops for timing.
It's difficult to move them to a modern system, especially if you don't have the source code.
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So true. I jumped straight from a 286 to a Pentium. Tried playing "A10 Tank Killer", which I used to play on the 286 (having a 3d game on a 286 was pretty damned impressive, however primitive!).
Lol, nope. As soon as you hit the button to start your engines you're up in the air, at max altitude in a blink of an eye, and in just a couple minutes, an entire half-hour mission had ended.
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I recall a tactical game called "Ancient Art of War," or something like that, that had some fairly in depth micromanaging, like having to tell your troops to eat. It relied on the real time clock. When I tried it on a 386, all my troops starved to death before I could click on them to tell them to eat.
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But moving it to a virtual system on new hardware would not remove the need for a Windows 3.11 Administrator. Anyway, you would still have to make sure the new hardware talks to the rest of the electronics in the train exactly the way the old one did. This isn't some choo-choo train, it has a top speed of over 170 mph.
But either way, developing a (secure!) replacement for the software or the hardware would take more time than it would still be in service after they did this, let alone installing it in al
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This is most likely the OEM that has manufactured this hardware and software in the first place. They have the source code and are perfectly capable of making new replacement parts for the hardware, including the CPU.
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Oh yes, the bad old days. Word Perfect, Lotus 123, and Autocad all demanded their own particular memory configuration and you had to reboot to change programs using a menu-driven autoexec file just as you describe.
Decnet to the VAX, then ARCnet to the admin building which was too far even for 10-Base-2 Ethernet. And MapCon maintenance software ran on the Novell server.
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[iAmWaySmarterThanYou] wouldn't do that crazy shit for any amount of money. Who would?
Some things you don't do (just) for the money.
I'd do it (mostly) for the challenge, if I was retired and my ancient skills were a little^H^H^H^H^Hot less rusty.
Sadly, I'm under-qualified, don't have the time, and don't want to relocate. Happily, I love my current employment situation.
Re:MS-DOS and Windows 3.11 Admin (Score:4, Insightful)
I dunno.
Define "any amount of money"....
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"More than they can afford to pay". :-)
Re:MS-DOS and Windows 3.11 Admin (Score:5, Interesting)
Oh, hell, I'd do that job for next-to-free, it sounds fun. In a decade and a half of working in the physical security industry I encountered all sorts of weird and ancient hardware configurations, including an entirely analog fire system that relied on air pressure and water power and a Model T generator (really). It was great fun.
Re:MS-DOS and Windows 3.11 Admin (Score:5, Funny)
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a digital archaeologist
Experimental [wikipedia.org] digital archeologist at that.
Well, I could do that (Score:3)
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Me too. I refurbish 70's through 90's computers, most of them having DOS as their operating system and Windows 3.xx installed. I can configure AUTOEXEC.BAT, CONFIG.SYS, and the numerous Windows .INI files in my sleep. If possible it would be interesting to bit-bang the serial or parallel ports of these systems to decipher the incoming signals (even easier if source code is available). If you know the byte stream then applying that to something like an Arduino or RasPi to decode and display/reply would be a
Re:Well, I could do that (Score:4, Insightful)
Sure it would. Free healthcare, to start.
Sure replace it (Score:2, Funny)
I'll take DOS running trains over Ubuntu. Hold on the unattended-upgrade service is running and restarted some daemons. Your train will be delayed.
Re:Sure replace it (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah a lot of old software is happy to keep chugging along. If it worked back then it will continue to work in perpetuity.
That said, old HARDWARE I don't trust. Magnetic media ages, moving parts in drives wear out, and capacitors inevitably go bad.
I'd trust it more running on updated hardware using something like FreeDOS (assuming you can find a BIOS based modern mobo) than using truly vintage hardware.
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Much of the problem is that unlike consumers, corporations might not necessarily have the budget to deal with upgrades every year, or every two years, no matter how loudly someone shouts at them that they're old. After all, they spent gawdawful amount of money to get a state of the art system from an expensive consultant and they're supposed to just ditch it all because there's a newer system? After 5 years maybe it's time, but someone's forgotten it exists, or there's no item in the budget to upgrade some
Re:Sure replace it (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Sure replace it (Score:4, Informative)
I'm showing how Linux is not the immediate solution most folks would assume.
Re:Sure replace it (Score:4, Informative)
I'll take DOS running trains over Ubuntu. Hold on the unattended-upgrade service is running and restarted some daemons. Your train will be delayed.
Are you sure, i.e. do you know DOS at all?
In ubuntu one can easily disable "unattended-upgrades", with DOS however a poorly written task can crash the whole system, not too mention corrupt all the data - it's an ancient OS, good for it's time, but not safe.
If we're talking about an ancient technology - I'd much prefer QNX.
Re:Sure replace it (Score:4, Interesting)
however a poorly written task can crash the whole system
Almost irrelevant to the considerations of running an legacy application. Any software that was servery buggy would have been replaced a long time ago. Survivor bias is on your side here the DOS and Windows 3 applications people are still using, are used because they worked, and well.
I don't think anyone is proposing doing new development (at least not beyond a little batch file or quick basic glue) or really even new deployments on DOS/Windows 3 here.
Re:Sure replace it (Score:5, Insightful)
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You do realize you can easily turn off all automatic upgrades in Ubuntu, right?
Of course, given the hardware they're running now, a RaspberryPI with Raspbian is a much more likely combination anyway.
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I'll take DOS running trains over Ubuntu. Hold on the unattended-upgrade service is running and restarted some daemons. Your train will be delayed.
Maybe that explains the many delays of trains in Germany: They started switching from DOS to Ubuntu.
(Yes, I mean that: Trains in Germany are *not* reliable. Haven't been for about a decade and it has been getting worse.)
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You laugh, but this happened to me several years ago. Commuting from Los Angeles to Orange County, the Metrolink I was on had a 10 minute delay at one of the stations. The conductor announced that they were "Rebooting the locomotive and we'll be moving again shortly". I had a sensible chuckle over that.
I also worked for a transit company in So Cal years ago, all of our busses ran Siemens Transitmaster, which was running on a small DOS computer in a rack directly behind the driver.
I'm surprised waiting for r
Probably Shop Floor equipment (Score:4, Insightful)
A lot of older Railroad maintenance equipment, specifically for shop floor environments used old, outdated PCs running as controllers for things like wheel truing, and repetitive tasks. It's not full-blown CNC but gives the operator some sense of measurement, and what the process is currently doing in terms of completion.
Re:Probably Shop Floor equipment (Score:5, Informative)
Indeed and it's not full CNC, it's completely custom kit for a very specific, very niche, very important task. Definitely in the realm of "if it works, do not under any circumstances fuck with it".
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Yeah, right. I think I posted this in usenet in the Windows 3.1 era and many times since then:
If it ain't broken, maintain it.
If it's broken, either repair it or discard it.
If it's beyond maintenance, it's definitely broken.
Old Hardware (Score:5, Insightful)
There are old presses and CNC machines that still run on Windows 9x/XP. The software is *very* specific, and has never been updated and, in some cases, the company has gone out of business and updates aren't available at all. These machines cost multiple millions of dollars, the interfaces and, sometimes, the controller boards are custom, and reverse-engineering is not an option. So, you keep a stash of old x86s in working order, with cloned hard drives, and you swap them in when necessary. Total cost is a few thousand dollars in time and gear per year, which is significantly cheaper than buying a new $5 million press.
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But when it does break... (Score:2)
Classic Tetris tournaments use modded roms (Score:2)
Classic Tetris tournaments use modded roms
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There are modern workarounds for some stuff though. For example if you don't want to use actual floppy disks on a Commodore 64 you can emulate the disk drive using a Raspberry Pi and flash storage. Kinda weird using a computer with hundreds of times more power than the C64 to emulate its disk drive, but it works (and it draws less power than the original drive did).
Just fix what breaks.
Not that weird, especially for the C64 (Score:3)
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I was thinking of that story too [slashdot.org] but in this context, more along the lines of "will they accept applicants from Japan?".
Time to dust off my phrasebook... (Score:3)
Mein Betriebssystem ist voller Aale.
I'm honestly shocked that they aren't running OS/2, but this seems like something that would work well with Dosbox and Wine, or KVM.
needs direct hardware access? (Score:2)
needs direct hardware access?
Non windows 9X real mode? drivers?
Needs manual low ram ranges likely on some ISA card that needs -12V / -5V ?
Risk-averse Re:Time to dust off my phrasebook... (Score:2)
There may be legal issues or just a sense of "we can't take even small risks, so don't change anything unless absolutely necessary" that rules out emulation or virtualization.
By the way, Google translates "Mein Betriebssystem ist voller Aale" as "My operating system is full of eels." Can you provide a better, maybe less literal, translation?
Re:Risk-averse Re:Time to dust off my phrasebook.. (Score:4, Informative)
We've found the one Slashdot poster who's never heard of Monty Python. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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Ouch, I deserved that. I need coffee.
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Loosely translates as "Willst du zu mir nach Hause kommen? hupfend, hupfend?"
Re:Time to dust off my phrasebook... (Score:4, Funny)
"Mein Betriebssystem ist voller Aale."
Meine Diskettenlaufwerke explodieren vor Freude!
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Achtung! Alles lookenspeepers!
That's a thing i did (Score:2)
A long time ago, but I wish for them, that their MS-DOS and Windows 3.1 run under a VM on a linux machine.
MS-DOS, please (Score:5, Insightful)
The admin would purportedly oversee systems with 166MHz processors and a whopping 8MB of RAM. It might seem slightly worrying that modern railways are still running on such ancient systems, but mission-critical systems often adhere to the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" philosophy.
It would be far more worrying if running a rail road required an application that needed 8 GB of RAM to run. That would mean seriously poor programming was involved.
I've written industrial planning systems that are reducible (in the theory-of-computation sense) to rail road planning. They just aren't that complicated. Far more importantly, when failure means potential for serious financial loss or even loss of life, as in a rail road, there is a very good reason to avoid the modern-shiny when the old-dull works well.
Tell me, exactly, what is wrong with an MS-DOS application to run a railway? Is an arduino application somehow better? A browser-based app running on a modern OS that can decide to go into update mode at any moment and so saturate its network connection that it ceases normal functioning, or that pops up a modal dialog that arrests the application until a human clicks OK? No thank you.
The old IBM PCs were built like brick outhouses. As long as you replace the capacitors once a decade after they start failing, blow out the dust from the chassis and clean the floppy drive heads, they should last indefinitely.
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Tell me, exactly, what is wrong with an MS-DOS application to run a railway? Is an arduino application somehow better? A browser-based app running on a modern OS that can decide to go into update mode at any moment and so saturate its network connection (...)
No, but building on top of a real-time OS such as QNX on either more recent hardware, Or customized hardware specially designed for your use case that is going to be continued to be manufactured indefinitely would seem more appropriate than continuing
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You can still buy brand new, DOS compatible machines.
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Running ancient DOS is their whole purpose (Score:2)
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Will their ancient dos version run on these new machines?
Pretty likely. They're basically very fast 486 class machines. Perusing some datasheets, I didn't see WFW 3.11 called out specifically, but some do support DR-DOS, so they run some pretty ancient stuff.
At a minimum someone would have to do a lot of testing to prove that and this is Germany so I imagine the test regime is going to be very thorough, time consuming and expensive.
Probably.
If they are compatible why has no one done it?
Probably because the
Looking for teh wrong skills honestly (Score:5, Informative)
Dos and Windows for Workgroups - really are not that 'complex' to administer. They just are not that big. What there isn't is a lot of 'help' in terms of how do you configure this driver to use the correct IO range...
That stuff though is mostly down to having a basic understanding of how the computer works, and being willing to RTFM, rather than just click around and hope.. Your text editor won't tell you what keys,value pairs even exist as choices in protocol.ini...You'll need to know - but if you have the documentation that came with it you should be fine.
The larger more complex issue is probably, how do i configure with Windows 2019 fileserver to expose a share to the workgroups machines without blowing up the security of the rest of the network so the csv logs they produce can get delivered to what or whoever needs them, and solving problems like that..
Halfway competent people trained for current Windows systems and network protocols/equipment should be able to handle this stuff with very little trouble, to be honest.
It was only ever 'hard' back in that period because you usually did not have anyone to ask, could not just post on server fault, and a lot of the IT people could not tell you what an address range for a network controller actually was because they did not have any kind of academic background in computer to make sense of the documentation beyond a cursory understanding of change these dip switches and this line in config.sys to match when it does not work.
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This system is almost certainly not on the network, or if it is it's just networking several related machines all doing the similar tasks that don't talk to anything else. In the latter case it would probably be running NetBEUI.
Re:Looking for teh wrong skills honestly (Score:4)
The main potential usefulness of those kind of skills comes in DOS memory management with conventional memory, high memory, UMBs, XMS, EMS, the EMS page frame, IO ranges... all that crazy DOS stuff that can be a nightmare to sort out and keep running. However, you'd hope they have a hardware and software baseline that isn't changing and the main issue would just be swapping out bits as they fail and maybe cloning HDs as they die (hopefully to something like IDE to compact flash adapters rather than depending on 30 year old spinning rust. Hopefully they have a closet/room/warehouse full of NOS hardware for replacements for this stuff so the baselines don't have to change much.
That said, if they've gotten to the "Buy whatever you can on eBay to keep it running" point of support then having the skills to troubleshoot why the new network card or serial interface card broke the whole system because it turns out it needs to have an exclusion added or moved in the upper memory area to keep from stomping on the EMS page frame because it turns out the new hardware has a hardcoded address range, and some bit of train management software requires EMS so just disabling it entirely isn't an option, then it could be something a lot more involved than just googling alone would really answer easily. I'm a retro tech enthusiast into all this stuff while also having a day job doing a bunch of The Cloud (TM) migration and management tasks and the vast majority of the people I work with, even the more senior and skilled people, would really struggle to get a retro machine up and running even with Google and resources. Especially if it had esoteric, poorly documented controllers or other specialized hardware.
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Of course, I did not mean there were "no resources" available. However compared to 'google it' someone else has probably already posted about and 'post on some forum read by half the industry'
All of the things you mentioned took a good deal of time and were not often viable strategy when something happened and you were trying to get the replacement Domino server stood up so everyone else in the office could get back to selling insurance policies - I know because i was there (as the very junior help).
It was
I have a contract gig as a Netware 3.12 Admin (Score:5, Interesting)
On a related note, I've gotten a small monthly payment from a business that still uses FoxPro 2 and Netware for its most critical application. The owner is finally retiring in October and I've already done all the work to move his actual data into another format, but this dude insists that he paid tens of thousands of dollars for this system and it's the only one he's ever gonna buy.
He's had three IT guys retire on him; I'm the youngest person he could find who can claim Novell experience (I'm 48), so he's been paying me for the last four years to keep his system up and running. The only thing I've done in all that time is clone his old drive to new ones, replace his DLT drive and make sure Legato is still working.
are they hunting ebay for parts to keep the old sy (Score:2)
are they hunting ebay for parts to keep the old systems up?
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Probably not. There's people making Vortex86 based PC-104 boards. They'll run DOS and ancient Windows happily, at lightning speeds too.
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Alley Cat runs fine on fast cpus! (Score:2)
Alley Cat runs fine on fast cpus!
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+1 for Alleycat!
I got way way too into that. I got may levels past the highest starting difficulty (Alleycat).
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Adrian Black seems to have plenty of old parts to keep his YouTube channel going.
I didn't yhink there were that many old PCs still around either, although I have a Mac SE that still works.
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Considering what the actual ad required, they are probably the actual OEM that manufactures these parts.
nope (Score:2)
You can still buy *new* motherboards that support MS DOS.
(But it would be hard to find ones that support Windows XP.)
I know that, because we still have two systems running MS DOS to access some ancient measurement hardware.
Why not use VMs for this? (Score:2)
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You think a VM would run on a 166Mhz Pentium with 8 megs of RAM?
I doubt they're using old machines for the fun of it , more likely they're industrial control systems using RS232 or some obscure out of date protocol using hardware/cards that won't work or even physically plug into on a new PC.
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Are you sure the virtual hardware behaves exactly like the old hardware under every circumstance? Would you be willing to put your signature on the final design?
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I don't know what they are running the software for. It may be equipment that is not mission critical, but just valuable enough to keep running.
I have several brass tag engravers sitting in my garage. They were given to me when I helped transfer a business after the owner died. If I remember correctly, the computer inside these machines runs on MS-DOS and some version of Windows. I don't think it would be a casual thing to separate the motherboard from the controls. The owner had two laser engravers but
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I remember PCI as having been introduced with the Pentium, so ISA is much more likely.
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There were a fair number of 486s with PCI, and I believe a single dual 386/486 board with it, but it wasn't super common. It had some limitations compared to later PCI, mostly with voltages and interrupts.
It mostly depends on whether they have a stash of NOS original hardware lying around for replacements, or if they've hit the "Buy whatever you can on eBay and keep it working however you can" level of support.
drivers (Score:2)
Yes, I can get the DOS drivers to load and not use up all of the memory so that Windows can run. But you can't afford me.
Dark demon of ineffective management (Score:4, Interesting)
I hate that saying! (Score:2, Insightful)
I hear this saying 20+ times a year, easily, and never once has it been used in a useful, or constructive manner. Just because a system or a process is working, doesn't mean it can't be improved, and at some point you need to think refactor, retrofit, and update. How many processes have we all seen where you have to run the program or protocol locked in ve
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"It's not broke don't fix it", is the same as saying: "We're lazy, stupid, incompetent, and can't fix it, should it break, if Bill goes on holidays!".
Sometimes, it's just that.
But it can also be "we are wise enough to know the limitations of our competence, we admit we can't fix (i.e. rebuild it correctly) it at a reasonable cost, and, if we don't touch it, there's an acceptably-low probability that it won't break when Bill is on holiday, but if we do touch it, the probability of failure is no longer known to be acceptably low."
If that's "lazy, stupid, and incompetent" then it's a very wise version of "lazy, stupid, and incompetent."
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Re:I hate that saying! (Score:5, Insightful)
Just because a system or a process is working, doesn't mean it can't be improved, and at some point you need to think refactor, retrofit, and update. How many processes have we all seen where you have to run the program or protocol locked in version 0.9.4-rc3 because in 1.0 they removed the insecure feature that made it all work, and they back ported the fix in to 0.9.4, to prevent additional issues?
If the system is working as designed then there is nothing to improve.
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Setup many DOS clients on networks (Score:2)
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need to add them to ghost boot disk + ide dma driv (Score:2)
need to add them to ghost boot disk + ide dma driver
166Mhz? so they have the Runtime 200 bug if you go (Score:2)
166Mhz? so they have the Runtime 200 bug if you go to 200Mhz?
DeutschBahn is a disaster (Score:3)
DB is and has been a complete and utter disaster for way over a decade now. Their trains and infrastructure is mostly ancient, badly maintained and breaks down constantly. Trains are so late, they are defining punctual as not more than 12-15mins late. And when a train is much too late, they cancel the whole train, drop the passengers off to wait for the next one, turn around and go back. Because a cancelled train was never officially late, you see.
I am not surprised they are still using Win3.11 somewhere. It just perfectly matches with the kind of company that DB really is. Antiquated, outdated garbage.
Actually it's not DB (Score:2)
So let's not be rude about them THIS time...
Require 40 years of experience? (Score:2)
Might Be Better than Windows 11 (Score:3)
The ironic downside of doing the job right!!! (Score:3)
Many of the best systems I've ever seen are ancient...the programmers really did the job right the first time and things just work...no one cared or updated it.
I had one app that lasted 15 years...I wanted it to die so desperately, but the company loved it and paid me a retainer to support it. I had to keep an ancient Windows XP laptop around because the development software was discontinued 10 years before they finally replaced the app.
We're going to see a lot more of this now that Java has largely stabilized. 20 years from now, you'll see Java REST services that will be 30 years old and running just fine.
In fact if Spring and Jackson would do a better job of protecting in deserialization attacks, we'd already have seen this...ancient REST services that run just fine on ancient platforms...and no matter how much you want to update them, no one will because the customer is perfectly happy with it. Or if Java EE had won the battle for the Java backend instead of Spring, we would have seen this. The Spring folks don't take backwards compatibility as seriously as they should. Java EE's greatest strength is that stuff written 20 years ago runs perfectly on modern containers and the latest version of everything. Spring loves to break APIs every major version...just change a signature here and there...no clue why...but they just don't respect backwards compatibility. However, if they did, there would be many ancient apps, perfectly patched, running without a source code change for decades.
I'll get right on that (Score:2)
I remember telling my boss, I really don't want to learn CP-67, these PCs are the future, I'm gonna learn Windows 3.11. And finally, hey! That's paying off.
ain't broke (Score:2)
MS-DOS and Win 3.11 are "broke" right out of the box.
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Really? One what basis do you assert that (other than no multitasking)?
I'm willing to learn German (Score:3)
But I'm not willing to learn Windows.
What most people don't realize (Score:3)
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Oh, baloney. There are all sort of ancient creaking systems running mission critical systems out there, as of a few years ago there was still a sawmill in Oregon that ran on punch cards. I've personally worked on Radionics alarm panels that were over 25 years old and continued plugging along that guarded backup generators for a hospital, and unless the enclosure starts to leak and fries it the panel will probably still keep going for years more.