1980s computer controls Grand Rapids Public School heat and AC

http://woodtv.com/2015/06/11/1980s-computer-controls-grps-heat-and-ac/

by ScottWRobinson • 11 years ago

278 260 11 years ago

woodtv.com

kybernetyk• 11 years ago

If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

LunaSea• 11 years ago

If nobody can fix it, break it.

pyre• 11 years ago

Well, at least planning for the future seems prudent. Otherwise if such a system breaks permanently, then you are scrambling to get something else up while the whole system is down (even ignoring the question of backups and data migration to a new system).

smcl• 11 years ago

Well the article says "If the computer stopped working tomorrow, a staff person would have to turn each building’s climate control systems on and off by hand" - I know that's not exactly a tiny job across 19 schools but it doesn't seem to be a hugely tough task

nodata• 11 years ago

If it's about to fail, have a replacement ready.

rbanffy5• 11 years ago

It's not like an Amiga 3000 or 4000 is that expensive anyway.

And, probably, they could run their software under an emulator, on any US$200 desktop PC.

kogepathic• 11 years ago

The only problem is that the computer operates on the same frequency as some of the walkie-talkies used by the maintenance department.

It's awesome that it's been functional for this long, but given the press attention I hope they don't receive unwanted attention given that this system was implemented in the 1980s, before computer security was as large an issue as it has become.[1]

With the amount of publicity this article has generated, I bet someone with an SDR is going to drive over and analyze the RF signals, and then hijack the HVAC systems for the lulz.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Notable_computer_viruses_and_w...

JoeAltmaier10• 11 years ago

Except its in Michigan.

A_COMPUTER• 11 years ago

Often it's dealing with interfaces. A couple years ago I worked at a place with a laser cutter, like an old one. You sent instructions to a program that talked to an interface card, which controlled the cutter. The program ran under DOS. It wasn't possible to replace the OS or machine easily, because it was an ISA card and had custom interface software that relied on having direct access.

jsulak• 11 years ago

mootothemax• 11 years ago

"A new, more current system would cost between $1.5 and 2 million."

How on earth! And where can I apply?

27182818284• 11 years ago

That doesn't seem unreasonable to me. My guess is they'll also be updating some of the controlled equipment at the same time too.

piptastic• 11 years ago

I'm guessing they mean to replace all the heating equipment as well.

brudgers6• 11 years ago

$2m might cover design fees for swapping out mechanical systems across 19 schools but probably not considering that this would be on the high end of the typical public project fee curve because of how messy HVAC renovations are for the sort of water distributed systems usually installed in large 40 year public buildings. It's not going to be craning in and out some package units from the rooftop.

brudgers6• 11 years ago

The proposal wouldn't be for replacing a computer and a 1200buad modem. It's for replacing a distributed HVAC control system at 19 locations. If you're doing that, you're going to want to bring the system up to current standards and that includes things like commissioning [1] the system for energy performance and replacing controls and logic at both ends...or maybe going away from a hub and spoke architecture. And it all comes with RFP's for design, public bids, performance bonds, insurance, warranties and all sorts of things that grandma's Wordpress site doesn't typically require.

[edit] To put it in perspective, getting the controls right dwarfs energy use. Let's call the cost $1.9 million and the number of sites 19 giving a cost per site of $100,000. Let's assume that the energy cost per site is $100,000/month and that the controls are capable of +10%. That puts the payback period at 10 months, so let's call it a year. Even if the efficiency improvement is only 1%, the payback period is well before the 30 year life cycle of the building (which not by coincidence matches the 30 year maturity of typical bonds and the bond financed control system built around an Amiga).

stickfigure2• 11 years ago

$100k per month per site for energy? That number seems high to me, but I can't seem to find a link suggesting for/otherwise. Is that really what schools pay?

jlebrech• 11 years ago

you could probably virtualise it onto raspberry pis.

rbanffy5• 11 years ago

2 million for 19 buildings gives you slightly more than 100K per location.

To me, it looks like a very optimistic guess.

castratikron• 11 years ago

And PDP-11s still run nuclear plants.

JoeAltmaier10• 11 years ago

Ah! PDP-11! I mis-spent my youth on one. I remember seeing one standing out in the rain in Los Alamos at an electronics surplus store. Didn't even rate getting inside the building under cover. Now that's melancholy.

saboot• 11 years ago

Nuclear launch commands are still stored on 8-inch (yes!) floppy disks!

rmxt2• 11 years ago

This legacy system issue doesn't just happen to remote/low budget operations either. While they've now moved to emulating the system on what are presumably VMs, Columbia University uses what amounts to a 40 year old system to post final grades to the student administration portal. Official transcript grades are updated once daily, at some time in the wee hours of the morning. From a Columbia CS professor:

"Columbia processes grades by using a system that was first released in 1972. In order to have kept it running for more than 40 years, it has consistently run special-purpose emulators that make its otherwise state-of-the-art systems think that they are stuck in the 70s and using an operating system called “CP/CMS”:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VM_(operating_system)

The grading system is written in a programming language called “Focus,” which in 1975 was one of the very first database languages developed and released:

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

But because of this, grades are processed only once per day, in a batch job that runs at about midnight every night. I am not making this up.

The university, recognizing that it is time for it to upgrade, does have plans for replacing the grading system. The upgrade is scheduled for the year 2020. I am not making this up either."

http://bwog.com/2014/01/06/why-your-grades-take-so-long-to-s...

I imagine these schools will eventually move to something similar: an emulated system with specialized hardware to interface with the mechanical equipment.

eli• 11 years ago

Many universities have systems like that. Banks too. Probably true of many early adopters: they built systems that worked and didn't rewrite them simply for the sake of having something new.

organsnyder8• 11 years ago

When I interned at IBM from 2003-2006, we submitted our timecards using a terminal application accessed over telnet. I don't know exactly what system it was, but the key commands certainly evoked thoughts of early mainframes.

nine_k• 11 years ago

It's not for the sake of having something new. New technologies do often provide obvious benefits. It's the cost of a new version (both in software development and reorganization of processes) that may be too high to justify these benefits.

HeyLaughingBoy5• 11 years ago

At my first job, we built I/O cards that did stuff like the Amiga in the article does. The cards used adapters so they could run on anything from TRS80's to PC's because at the time the system was conceived, the IBM PC hadn't emerged as the dominant desktop yet.

The company is long out of business, but every so often someone finds some of their products at a garage sale or industrial auction or it comes in a box of other things on eBay. When they search for manuals on the product they often find me because by coincidence someone asked about those products on a forum I frequent and that conversation tends to come up in the first page on google.

It's amazing how many really old systems are still running after decades without change and no one gives it a thought until something breaks. I've often wished I had a list of their old customers so I could contact them and offer my services to upgrade old controls.

[sigh] another business opportunity missed.

ams6110• 11 years ago

Most of my credit cards will not update the balance immediately after I make a payment. It takes a day (sometimes more, depending on timing). Clearly batch processes are involved.

There's nothing wrong with batch processes. They are often easier to reason about than having a system where everything can change in real time.

Sometimes you want real time. Sometimes (many times) a daily batch is just fine.

rbanffy5• 11 years ago

grades are processed only once per day

Playing devil's advocate here...

Do grades change during the day?

slipjack2• 11 years ago

Different teachers putting their grades in at different times of the day? Sure.

rmxt2• 11 years ago

Grades on the Columbia equivalent of the Moodle/Blackboard student portal can and do update instantly as soon as teachers hit submit. This is a recently updated, fairly modern system. However, these are not necessarily the official grades that go on your transcript. In my experience, teachers often never post the (possibly curved) final letter grade on this system. I assume that transcript grade system is a separate portal that teachers have to input the final letter grades into. This system, from the POV of the student, only updates once per day. Teachers put their grades in at 5pm? You get your "grade has been posted email" at like 2 am, and practically speaking get your grade whenever you wake up.

NoMoreNicksLeft2• 11 years ago

Grades would change any time an instructor chooses to input new grades. Some exam is graded, homework is turned in.

The vast majority of them wait til the last minute to do it, right at the end of term.

sliverstorm3• 11 years ago

My memory of University is that professors are the bottleneck to updating your grades, not the nightly batching system.

freehunter• 11 years ago

I know what you mean comparing it to Columbia University, but Grand Rapids isn't exactly a remote location. It's the second largest city in Michigan. We're not talking about northern Alaska.

organsnyder8• 11 years ago

It's not remote, but the school district hasn't exactly been flush with cash over the past few decades. If this occurred in East Grand Rapids, Forest Hills, etc., I would be more surprised.

NoMoreNicksLeft2• 11 years ago

Even modern software would work like this. Many universities use a product called Appworx that schedules jobs... and your grades are only going to be upgraded once per day.

jccalhoun• 11 years ago

Probably works a lot better than the crappy peoplesoft system my college bought into...

hurricaneSlider• 11 years ago

You have that too. Are you from UCT?

bitwize• 11 years ago

IBM mainframes incorporate VM technology in both senses of the word: the "abstract ISA" sense and the "simulated hardware" sense. They knew they were building systems that may have to be online for decades; and the exact same object code that ran on the original System/360 runs bit-identical on a brand new POWER-based mainframe (though obviously faster).

invisible_dust• 11 years ago

I'm pretty sure they could buy a $50 laptop off craigslist instead of a 1.5-2 million dollar systems upgrade. These are the morons teaching children.

Jtsummers2• 11 years ago

They aren't replacing a computer. They're replacing a (at this point) hard to maintain system for controlling their HVAC system and other aspects of their HVAC system. For 19 schools, this seems cheap to me. More modern HVAC and HVAC controls will also result in reduced energy costs saving the district money further down the line.

vidarh7• 11 years ago

The irony of accusing someone of being morons without understanding the scope of the project you're criticising them for.

stormen• 11 years ago

Well, at least they don't have to worry about viruses.

romland• 11 years ago

Virii were mostly spread over floppy (boot block or trojan) back then. While I agree that it's very unlikely that this system will get infected, don't think that times were better back then :)

http://www.teyko.com/View.aspx?id=346&name=Saddam+Virus

...which was a rather brilliant little thing, but a personal hatred as it messed up many a .s files (.s stood for "source code" or "Seka", I guess).

to3m• 11 years ago

Obligatory nitpick regarding the plural of "virus": http://linuxmafia.com/~rick/faq/plural-of-virus.html

jrochkind1• 11 years ago

That it would cost 1.2 million to replace something that was probably done for, oh, $20K in (say) 1980... says something about where we've gone.

For reference, 1.2 million in 2014 dollars is around $418K in 1980 dollars.

dsr_• 11 years ago

If your first thought is that $2M to replace an Amiga is ridiculous, stop.

They wouldn't be replacing the Amiga for $2M. They'll be replacing a 19 site remote HVAC control system, certainly including new radio systems, local controllers, and the central controller. They will want something with a warranty and a service contract for the next 20-30 years.

bechampion• 11 years ago

thanks for the clarification , the article was misleading to the max

organsnyder8• 11 years ago

Welcome to West Michigan local media (though I'm sure this phenomenon isn't unique to this area). While it can probably be explained by bad writing, they've also learned that anything that provokes the ire of tea-partiers is golden for driving pageviews.

JustSomeNobody3• 11 years ago

And it probably would not function as well as this (even with this setup's many issues).

organsnyder8• 11 years ago

I see no reason for it not to. Keep in mind that this system has also required maintenance over the years (just like any system). The cost savings from improved efficiency (more granular control, reacting to weather & building occupancy, etc.) will also be a huge improvement.

protomyth3• 11 years ago

Modern climate control systems are quite nice if setup correctly and do a very good job. Probably save them quite a bit of money over the 30+ year lifespan of the new system.

monochromatic• 11 years ago

What's wrong with just using thermostats in each building? This seems way over-engineered.

mrits2• 11 years ago

The best way to set the temperature at a comfortable level is guessing every 30 years what you want each building to feel like.

da_chicken3• 11 years ago

The same reason you don't put a space heater and window AC in every room. Because it's inefficient, ineffective, and archaic.

ohitsdom• 11 years ago

A big reason is cost-savings. This prevents each building occupant from setting the AC too cold, or forgetting to turn it up/off when they leave at the end of the day and for breaks.

maxerickson3• 11 years ago

Are we sure that the current system doesn't have that?

Even if they do install local controls, a central monitoring system makes some sense for buildings that go unoccupied for days at a time.

dmritard96• 11 years ago

I dunno. You could find plenty of people that would make it their full time job to just turn on and off systems for 2M over 20 or maybe 30 years. :)

spc476• 11 years ago

At 20 years, $2m means you can hire 3 people for $33k a year to do the job. At 30 years, you can only hire 2 people for $33k/year. That figure does not include benefits. That may or may not be viable for 19 schools (depending on how far apart they are, etc).

jokr0043• 11 years ago

The radio system made sense back in the 80s before cheap, reliable internet access was widely available, but I feel like IP would be a much more practical communications solution today.. especially considering the fact that the 2-way radios used by the maintenance staff interferes with the existing system.

Though your point is still totally valid, I'm just thinking out loud.

ChickeNES3• 11 years ago

Funnily enough it likely is already using TCP/IP: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMPRNet

TeMPOraL2• 11 years ago

before cheap, reliable internet access was widely available

Cheap and reliable Internet access is still not widely available. You don't want to have your HVAC stop working because ISP botched something up. Frankly, IMO there should be zero reason for any of the HVAC control loop to extend beyond the building. Sending data from your controller to your device next to it through half the world and back is insane, and yet it is what's happening with IoT right now.

DannoHung2• 11 years ago

I still don't completely see why it'll be $2M, unless that's the total cost including the service contract for the system's lifetime. I mean, the hardware and installation labor can't be that expensive, right?

Lorento• 11 years ago

Yes, it doesn't quite add up. For that money, you could hire the guy to turn things on and off by hand for 50 years.

maxerickson3• 11 years ago

The GRPS website says that they operate 67 buildings, which leads me to speculate that the $2 million includes upgrading other parts of the HVAC system at each school.

Not all that much pops out of a few searches, but there are discussions of projects that make me think that $100,000 per building isn't a lot to spend on such a thing.

bliti2• 11 years ago

It would mostly be all the contractor and subcontractor costs. I'd say they need at least a couple of electricians, which are usually unionized and charge plenty (I have no issues with unions, it just costs more). The plumbers, because you can't hack into a wall without hitting a water pipe. Then the HVAC people, who have different sub specialties. Then the people who do the cement/wood/boarding. Not including the inspectors...

lurkinggrue2• 11 years ago

Yeah as well as coding a new system from scratch. If they wanted to replace the Amiga they can go on Ebay and spend $400.

whatusername• 11 years ago

Here was an $88M project to replace a system of similar vintage: http://www.smh.com.au/technology/technology-news/30yearold-r...

bencollier49• 11 years ago

"That's probably because he wasn't sick. He was skipping school. Wake up and smell the coffee, Mrs. Bueller. It's a fool's paradise. He is just leading you down the primrose path.... I've got it right here in front of me. He has missed nine days...." eight, seven, six..

NamTaf• 11 years ago

My company, an ASX30 corporation, still runs its operations through an emulated IBM 3270 terminal sitting on top of a DB2 v8 mainframe with literally thousands of tables in it. 4 character transaction codes and ctrl as 'enter command' for all!

We're currently developing a replacement SAP solution. I'm yet to decide which is more obtuse.

edit: The SAP solution was spurred not because the old system was breaking but rather that when the COO asked for some daily reports and the IT propellerheads replied that the data crunching to generate said 24 hour reports took more than 24 hours to run.

chestervonwinch• 11 years ago

A Kentwood High School student programmed it when it was installed in the 1980s. Whenever the district has a problem with it, they go back to the original programmer who still lives in the area.

Now that's job security!

SmellyGeekBoy• 11 years ago

I wonder what the hourly rate is ;)

tacone• 11 years ago

30 years of service? Sounds like a success story.

0xdeadbeefbabe• 11 years ago

Especially in light of the cost of "updating" it. I realize it's not the $2M to replace an amiga.

tempodox• 11 years ago

Amiga? That had a Motorola 68000 CPU, if I remember correctly.

I knew when I saw the MC68k the first time that it had the Schwartz to rule them all — and decades later it's still true :)

wumbernang• 11 years ago

I thought that. Then living in the UK our first 32-bit ARM personal computers turned up in 1987. They even ran rings around high end Unix kit. And here I am in 2015 typing this on a 32-bit ARM A7...

nickbauman3• 11 years ago

There is at least one Amiga emulator. http://www.winuae.net/

nickbauman3• 11 years ago

More than one: http://www.amigaforever.com/emulator/

kyberias• 11 years ago

Amiga Forever is basically WinUAE.

ekianjo2• 11 years ago

There's FS-UAE as well.

Nelson69• 11 years ago

What's the realistic life expectancy of modern hardware?

I ran a Ras. Pi system for monitoring my sprinklers and such but after about 9 months it has had some funkiness, I suspect power related and then the flash has had a couple little glitches. I couldn't see it lasting 5 years. I have an odroid-c1 that seems to be more robust in terms of power and such (it has a dedicated transformer, not some cheap USB that seems to "work") I do worry about the flash crapping out... Although if the policy is to burn a few flashes and just keep some spares, you should have quick recovery.

Maybe some good server grade hardware, in a data center, you can expect some decent life.

HeyLaughingBoy5• 11 years ago

Most embedded system failures are due to power and I/O.

If you have robust power supplies from a reputable manufacturer (I like TDK/Lambda) with good filtering on the input (maybe external powerline filter modules), and you protect your external inputs and outputs, then the next thing to worry about is flash lifetime which should be measured in decades if you're not writing to it.

Problem with a Rasp Pi/Beaglebone is that it's running Linux and there are likely disk writes occurring, so your lifetime drops. If you can both limit disk writes and get long lifetime SSDs, I don't see why it shouldn't last at least 10 years.

Animats• 11 years ago

"What's the realistic life expectancy of modern hardware?"

Lower that it used to be. The design life for the Ford EEC-IV engine control system from the 1980s was 30 years. The program is mask-programmed onto the chip, and the parameter table is in a fuse-blowing type ROM. Many of those are still on the road.

With newer hardware, lifetimes are shorter. This is a big problem for long-lived military systems.[1] Electromigration becomes more of a problem as IC features get smaller.

There are embedded systems where 30-50 years of operation is needed. Pumping stations, HVAC, railroad signals, etc. have equipment which can run for decades with occasional maintenance. The NYC subway is still using century-old technology for signaling. It's bulky, but works well.

[1] http://mil-embedded.com/articles/obsolete-cycle-costing-you/

nickbauman3• 11 years ago

I read somewhere, actually I think it was an interview with Google's Saul Griffith, who said no smart phone was designed to run longer than 6 or 7 years in ideal circumstances. Realistically I imagine 5 years as unusually long regardless.

icebraining2• 11 years ago

The flash survival rate heavily depends on how the system is configured. If you move every writable directory (/tmp, /var/log, /var/run, etc) to a tmpfs filesystem and make the main filesystem readonly, it'll live much longer (and better survive hard reboots).

The Debian Wiki has an overview of what you might need to change to achieve it: https://wiki.debian.org/ReadonlyRoot

roneesh• 11 years ago

'Old code' !== 'Bad Code'

I would say that's an assumption we as developers need to teach society, but we should really work on teaching it to ourselves first. I can't tell you how many times I've heard "We should just start over" rather than try and understand what we have.

flurpitude2• 11 years ago

The software would only be a small part of this project. The issues they discussed in the clip (risk of sudden failure, radio interference) were hardware issues.

JustSomeNobody3• 11 years ago

This. Nobody today would even consider trying to design something so simple it could last three decades. And certainly nobody would want to support it. Everyone wants shiny and new...

geon2• 11 years ago

Some arduinos with an ethernet shield and a super simple web backend?

qntm• 11 years ago

Whether or not they realise it, I think people are building brand new systems right now, using cutting-edge technology, which will survive until 2045.

da_chicken3• 11 years ago

Agreed. It ran for 30 years and hasn't had problems (other than the radio interference issue). Anything that has lasted for 30 years has had nearly every bug worked out or worked around. The only things that survive for 30 years are systems that do the job.

beambot• 11 years ago

Until a single point of failure hits and you're in a mad-scramble to get a replacement system up and running.

drzaiusapelord2• 11 years ago

Its not the code that's concerning, its the hardware. The idea that they never bothered to virtualize or emulate this in 30 years says a lot about how IT is run at that school.

A single developer could emulate whatever IO goes to that radio and have it controlled by a simple computer with redundancy. I wonder what they're paying the original developer to maintain this turkey. I imagine he's charging enough to where the sunk cost fallacy is obvious here.

What I find interesting is all the places where FOSS is lacking. There doesn't seem to be a popular and well managed FOSS climate control system. Is anyone making standardized controllers, thermostats, etc? This stuff should be a commodity by now. I'm guessing its hard to work with all the proprietary HVAC stuff and its also an unsexy problem to solve. I'd love to replace my thermostat with a raspberry pi and have a lot of fun modern features. There's a hackaday article about someone doing this, but its a pretty primitive project.

dnfehren• 11 years ago

There are some projects to start bring FOSS ideas/ideals to building system controls and decision making like this, but I think there are significant difficulties in the variety of proprietary systems and reluctance to change due to capital costs and/or maintenance contracts.

https://github.com/VOLTTRON/volttron from Pacific Northwest National Lab is one example.

amk_• 11 years ago

Is anyone making standardized controllers, thermostats, etc?

http://www.bacnet.org/

serve_yay2• 11 years ago

I think they got very lucky that the original programmer didn't move away or decide he didn't want to maintain this thing anymore, whenever some dingus from the school district decided to bother him. I'm seeing a lot of people ignore that aspect of the situation. There's a reason we talk about the bus number.

justinpaulson• 11 years ago

It is true that old code is not necessarily bad code. However, HVAC system controls have had very large improvements in efficiency over the last 30 years. HVAC systems are the single largest use of energy in a commercial building and the improvements that modern controls can offer in efficiency can greatly offset the costs of installing those new systems.

lutorm• 11 years ago

True. Hardware, though, does get old.

douche2• 11 years ago

I'm mostly a back-end guy... does it really matter if you you use != vs !== when you know that both operands have the same type in javascript? In this case, you've got string literals, so (flying spaghetti monster, I hope there won't be any type conversions going on)

lmm• 11 years ago

It matters for anyone who maintains your code. "!=" is a big red flag, better to consistently use "!==".

flurpitude2• 11 years ago

Pedantic, but if it's an Amiga 2000 (which it appears to be from the video) then this can't have been running since 1985, as the Amiga 2000 was released in 1987. But the guy does say the computer came from eBay, so perhaps this is a replacement for their original Amiga.

abruzzi• 11 years ago

I'm not sure how the RF interface works, but it it uses a zorro card, the A2000 would be the first computer that could run it. If it used serial, the even a A1000 would be a possible system.

pacofvf• 11 years ago

I wonder how many software from the 70s and 80s in not so famous languages are lost forever. And if is there an effort to preserve such works?

HeyLaughingBoy5• 11 years ago

What for?

vidarh7• 11 years ago

History, for starters.

jes• 11 years ago

Here is one effort. There may be more of course:

http://www.textfiles.com/bitsavers/

nandhp• 11 years ago

The Computer History Museum has established a Software Preservation Group: http://www.softwarepreservation.org/

They also have artifacts like MacPaint source code in their collection: http://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/102658076

teebot• 11 years ago

Michigan hipsters

organsnyder8• 11 years ago

The GRPS headquarters is dangerously close to Eastown.

organsnyder8• 11 years ago

The GRPS director of communications just gave a presentation on the bond proposal last night at our neighborhood association meeting. Like any urban district, GRPS has faced a very challenging few decades with declining enrollment, competition from charters and suburban districts, and a largely impoverished student population. They've made huge strides over the past few years, since the current superintendent took over in 2012. It's been really exciting to watch.

At the presentation, the spokesman stressed that the previous bond was strictly to shore things up—anything that could be delayed, was. I can see that he wasn't kidding.

kens2• 11 years ago

The record for obsolete computing probably goes to Sparkler Filters, which still uses an IBM 402 tabulator from 1948 for their accounting. This machine reads information from punch cards, adds it up, and prints reports. That wouldn't be too bad, except this tabulator is before the vacuum tube generation. It is electromechanical, using mechanical counter wheels for addition.

It is programmed by plugging dozens of wires into a control panel; each wire indicates something like this card column goes to this adder and that printer column. To change the program, you pull out the panel and replace it with a different panel. The "software library" consists of shelves of panels wired up for each task.

This system actually surprisingly sophisticated considering the lack of technology. For instance, there's a mechanical mechanism to suppress leading zeros in numbers. It can print text as well as numbers and supports three levels of subtotals as well as conditionals. It It's also fairly fast, processing 150 cards per minute.

Links: http://www.pcworld.com/article/249951/if_it_aint_broke_dont_... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_402 http://bitsavers.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de/pdf/ibm/punched...

ekianjo2• 11 years ago

Wow, an Amiga still running 30 years later, 24/7! That's solid hardware. As a former Amiga owner, I find this impressive.

vidarh7• 11 years ago

There are still several forums full of current Amiga users [1] [2] [3] [4] being the most prominent English language ones. The most amazing thing is that there is still new hardware expansion being designed and manufactured for the original machines...

[1] http://www.amiga.org

[2] http://www.amigaworld.net

[3] http://www.amigans.net

[4] http://eab.abime.net/

nickpsecurity5• 11 years ago

Those kind of results are why I encourage copying past designs for new hardware projects in safety-critical space. Especially NonStop architecture, which is patent-free now. Take one of older ones, make it 32-64 bit, put modern interfaces on it, put it on an older SOI process node for reliability, optional lockstep, and the result should run very well for a very long time.

notvplez2• 11 years ago

Was hoping it would be an Amiga, and wasn't disappointed. Though it seems like this particular system is ripe for replacement because of the issues mentioned, I have a lot of respect for staying with old soft- and hardware instead of chasing something new and shiny when the old system still gets the job done.

A few years back a seller came to my workplace to ask if we wanted to advertise at our local cinema. We didn't, but I had a chat with the guy and was pleasantly surprised to discover that he was still creating and showing the ads using an A1200 with a genlock card running Scala (25 years old this year, real popular in the nineties with cable companies and broadcasters as big as CNN and BBC). Reason for not upgrading? "It still works great." Put a big smile on my face for the rest of the day.

kaffeinecoma• 11 years ago

For those confused by 25 year old Scala: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scala_(company).

douche2• 11 years ago

Thank you. This being HN, I immediately was thinking the FP-ish programming language, which would seem to indicate that it predates the JVM...

HeyLaughingBoy5• 11 years ago

I'm a bit confused: are you saying that the system was running Scala for 25 years? Thought Scala was just a few years ago.

And was the genlock card a Video Toaster by any chance?

notvplez2• 11 years ago

The first version of Scala was released in 1990 if I'm not mistaken, he probably used a later version as he was using a A1200 which had the AGA-chipset that improved graphics considerably. He'd been using it "for about twenty years", and as this was two or three years ago and the A1200 was released in 1992 he probably had a 22 year run on the same hardware and software. He didn't specify the card he used, but I think it's safe to say it was the Video Toaster given its popularity at the time.

wgx• 11 years ago

Scala (the programming language) and Scala (the Amiga video software) are two different things. :)

gambiting• 11 years ago

Polish Railways(state owned) had an Odra 1305 machine, manufactured in 1973, still operating on one of their stations until 2010. It's fascinating really.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odra_(computer)

frik• 11 years ago

Many companies run on SAP R/3 ABAP (1983) code or even still SAP R/2 ASM code. The ABAP code syntax is somewhat similar to COBOL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABAP . And many banks still use PL/1 (1964) or COBOL (1959): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PL/I and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COBOL . And Fortran (1957) has still the best optimized compilers, surpassing often even C compilers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortran

_JamesA_• 11 years ago

Don't forget about RPG/II/III/IV/LE/... [1][2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_RPG

[2] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/ibm-midrange

bane• 11 years ago

I remember a conversation I had with a friend's father, an HVAC engineer. He brought home a control board one-time, showed me the sensor inputs and control outputs. I don't remember how many there were, but let's say a dozen of each.

He described how a sensor in would connect to this spot and feed the system temperatures from a sensor in some remote part of the building. The control output would then go to the appropriate HVAC system and turn on/off A/C, heat or whatever to get the temperature to what it needed to be at.

The system would spider out around the building with these sensors and regulate the building's temperature.

At the heart of the board (which looked like a PC motherboard) was the CPU, a z80, already hilariously ancient when he showed this to me. So I asked him "why not use a more modern CPU?"

He responded, "why? This z80 can control an office building's entire HVAC system, and poll each sensor 200 times a second, how many times per second do you need? Temperature in a zone doesn't change that fast."

It was my introduction to the concept of "Lateral Thinking with Withered Technology" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunpei_Yokoi#Lateral_Thinking_...

userbinator2• 11 years ago

Z80s are still available new and in IP core form for integration into SoCs... as is the 6502, 8051, and several other "classic" MCUs designed in the late 70s/early 80s.

As I'm typing this my keyboard's controller is an 8051 variant, the touchscreen of my phone also uses an 8051, the mouse has a 6502, and the monitors in front of me have an 80186 core in them.

They are fast enough for the task, cheap, and development tools widely available, so they really don't need to be replaced.

qanael• 11 years ago

It's kind of mind blowing that our cheap peripherals are driven by what used to be top-of-the-line processors only a few decades ago. I guess all that firmware has to run on something.

vidarh7• 11 years ago

Interesting considering the article, it was a defining part of Commodore hardware design that they compensated for slow CPU's by using co-processors all over the place, including putting a 6502 compatible CPU in the keyboard controller for the A500 and A2000...

(But you'd also find this spilling over into 3rd party hardware: My HD controller for my Amiga 2000 back in the day had a Z80 on it.

That machine was totally schizophrenic: In addition to the 6502 core on the keyboard, the M68k main CPU and the Z80 on the HD controller it also had an x86 on a bridge board - the A2000 had both Amiga-style Zorro slots and ISA slots, including one slot where both connectors were in line where you could slot in a "bridge board" with an 8086 that effectively gave you a PC inside your Amiga, with the display available in a window on the Amiga desktop).

aswanson3• 11 years ago

Do you think its better to teach uni students on new processors and tools e.g. Freescale, ARM, etc. or on older z-80, 80186 cpus?

ChickeNES3• 11 years ago

What mouse uses a 6502?

selimthegrim• 11 years ago

TI runs all its low-level calculator stuff on Z80 emulators which are then helpfully run by whatever actual chip they are putting in the calculators these days.

macNchz• 11 years ago

It was my introduction to the concept of "Lateral Thinking with Withered Technology" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunpei_Yokoi#Lateral_Thinking_....

Thanks for sharing this, I love finding creative new ways to take advantage of 'tried & true' technology and it's something that regularly feeds into how I build software–sometimes to the displeasure of colleagues who are most interested in the shiniest new tools. It's interesting to read about how this sort of thinking worked for Nintendo.

seanp2k22• 11 years ago

Why write your own 10-line function to do it when you could use this library and do it with 3 (not including the 3k line lib)

ChuckMcM3• 11 years ago

This is so true, and even today with new designs you end up with overkill. A Cortex M0 (32 bit ARM system) with 128K of flash and 64K of RAM is 75 cents in quantity. That means the processor complex is essentially "free" with respect to the cost of the other bits (sensors, actuators, communication over distance). The risk is that with all that "extra power" the programmer decides to use it creatively for something like "A built in web server to show you status of everything" and that "feature" requires you connect it to the wider network, and that "webserver" never gets patched, and now you have an HVAC system which becomes the exploit vector to get into a much bigger facility/network.

All because designing in a "limited" computer didn't make economic sense, and programmers couldn't help but use the extra CPU capacity that was available.

That is what makes IoT a challenge / bad-idea to a lot of people.

bliti2• 11 years ago

Spot on. Programmers in general are not well-versed in security. I don't mean you, the reader of this comment. But as a collective. The other people who write code through which you can pass buses full of black hats. Not you. Web applications with huge budgets get owned by common mistakes. And those web applications don't have access to anything but data. Imagine having all those same, eh, security issues, in devices that can interact with the real world. I really don't want my microwave to suddenly turn on and keep going for hours at time while I'm out of the house.

This comment is purely fictional. IoT is perfect.

schnable• 11 years ago

It seems insane to think that a programmer would just "decide" to build a feature like that. It would have to be decided by the product people, who probably think it's a good idea.

TeMPOraL2• 11 years ago

I've noticed the opposite thing. Most of the hardware around is built on the weakest specs that still let the thing run. Those various 10 cent savings on flash and μC tend to add up quickly when you go into mass production.

But the primary problem, which is not limited to but obviously visible in IoT, is that companies ask themselves "what sells?" instead of "what is good and useful?". All that crap that is being created, with useless "features" that introduce security holes foster the fragmentation of the ecosystem, is pushed because someone out there figures out that people will buy it. But almost no one understands the implications of all these "features" so the buying decision they make is usually wrong and stupid.

I wish someone cut out sales people from the design process. You should be able to get designers and engineers together, having them ask themselves what would be an optimal, actually useful smartwatch/smartfridge/smarttoilet/whatever and how to build it, and then tell sales people to figure out how to sell it. But no optimizing for better sellability.

samstave• 11 years ago

Totally off the top of my head, but:

It seems like a service discovery system for IoT devices might be a good idea where the service discovery system is tracking what is actually allowed to run a particular service - like an HVAC system running embedded webserver.

For example, imagine if the industry had it so that the HVAC system was to announce that it had the capability to be an embedded webserver for status - but it instead should check to see if there is a different host to where it should send its metrics. This way you could control what the core host is for said website - and have all systems in the community basically ask for direction on self-hosting or publishing...

ArkyBeagle2• 11 years ago

You have to not do that. Cycles you don't use cost absolutely nothing. Indeed, they may actually reduce jitter if you're careful ( they should not but that's another story ) .

This is the ultimate YAGNI.

serve_yay2• 11 years ago

At some point it may become cost-prohibitive (or unwieldy in some other way) to continue to manufacture such chip designs, even though many applications may not require additional raw horsepower.

superuser2• 11 years ago

Why? So you can use modern, friendly UIs to control it instead of scary there-be-dragons only-one-guy-in-facilities-is-allowed-to-touch-it Win32 apps.

lurkinggrue2• 11 years ago

At best can replace it with a Raspberry PI instead of a full on PC.

LordKano• 11 years ago

From time to time, I am greeted with looks of shocked disbelief when a younger employee finds out how much of my employer's business gets done on OpenVMS Alphas and IBM Mainframes. They think it's stupid that we're not running it all on HP servers in the data center.

The thought never occurs to them that it's rock solid, only needs quarterly patching(at most) and has had 20+ years of tweaks that make it fit our needs. We don't need to replace it, yet.

nickpsecurity5• 11 years ago

Not to mention there's VMS clusters with 20+ years of uptime. The systems, especially Alphas, were so reliable that at least one sysadmin forgot how to restart them and had to consult the manual lol. I wish they made a good desktop. I'd have used it and probably lost less work. ;)

A link for you: http://h71000.www7.hp.com/openvms/brochures/commerzbank/comm...

Notice how "all systems crashed" from heat except the AlphaServer. That's great engineering, right there. It's why I wish they were still around outside eBay. That plus PALmode: most benefits of microprogramming without knowing microprogramming. :)

danjayh2• 11 years ago

When people really need something that's reliable, there's really no limit to how much effort can be put into producing a system with unfailing integrity and availability.

Take, for example, the lockstep facility on certain IBM processors:

https://www-01.ibm.com/chips/techlib/techlib.nsf/techdocs/29...

You can take two or more of them, run identical software on them, and compare their output on a cycle-by-cycle basis.

Now, the 750GX series may be a bit out of date in the modern era ... but good luck achieving that level of paranoid system integrity with just about any truly modern system.

One thing that I think they don't teach so well in most colleges is that a system's compute performance is not always the most important measurement of the system's capability.

rtpg• 11 years ago

the counter to lateral thinking nowadays is power efficiency. Imagine underclocking the iphone 6 processor to 1st gen iphone screens. I image you'd get quite a bang for your buck on that one.

Though I am a big proponent of lateral thinking in general, for battery powered devices the optics change a little I think.

chavesn• 11 years ago

How common are remote radio controllers in historical or modern systems?

I think the most interesting part of this article is the use of radio for a wide-area network, even if it only got a passing mention in the article.

Some questions I'd love to know: What kind of protocol was used? Are computer uses of walkie-talkie radio bands allowed by the FCC? How do the receivers work? If they don't run on their own microprocessor, how were they designed?

ChickeNES3• 11 years ago

Almost certainly Packet Radio: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Packet_radio, probably on the amateur band: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMPRNet

switchbak• 11 years ago

This is actually surprisingly novel, and especially impressive given the developer was in high school at the time.

Running ethernet to these locations can be challenging, and often an SMS based approach or mesh network is used instead - which is really not that far off from this approach (with some obvious benefits).

nickpsecurity5• 11 years ago

Thanks! I knew they used something but nobody ever told me what the old standards were. I'm adding it to my link farm as some call it. Bet I find a use for it, too. :)

kw712• 11 years ago

This application should not be allowed in Amateur Radio service, because it's being used as part of a business or government operation.

The piece of spectrum this system actually uses, since it is shared with their maintenance radio fleet, is definitely not part of any amateur service allocation ("band")

The term 'packet radio' also implies (to me anyway) certain kinds of applications and messages, which don't apply to a system like this. Anyway, if there was some kind of IP or other routable protocol on the air here, that would be overdoing it. The messages probably look more like what you'd find on a multidrop serial bus, with elements including source and destination address, length, payload, checksum. A bunch of FSK modems working on the same radio channel is not much different to a multidrop serial bus.

kw712• 11 years ago

Data on radio channels is common! All you need is a "radio" and a "modem," and there are many variants of either.

These kinds of radio channels are already allocated to 'business' or 'government' service by the FCC. The user has licensed the use of one or more in a specific geographical area. These channels are 2.5kHz wide, but the old fashion was 5kHz bandwidth. They were allocated with FM audio in mind, which is what the portable radios do. You're normally allowed to run data on these channels.

The radio used at each node is probably a "mobile" radio intended for mounting in a vehicle but configured as a kind of base station by adding a DC power supply. Motorola has been selling microprocessor controlled, frequency-synthesized radios since the early 1980's, and the earliest one I know of used a 6800 processor (actually Hitachi 6300 series clone of M's cpu). The channel is probably shared with the maintenance chatters because the county already had the license, a radio fleet, and a shop to maintain the radios. By changing a "CTCSS" or "PL" tone to one that is different to the ones used by the voice radios, the maintenance chatters don't have to hear squawks and whistles all day and night.

The modem is probably an FSK kind of modem with a rate of something like 1200 bps. This works by representing 0 and 1 with different audio tones and is very simple with complete integrated silicon available during the 1980's. It's interfaced to the radio's audio input and output, the computer/modem needs a way to cause the radio to transmit, and it is nice to have a signal to show whether the radio channel is busy or idle. Otherwise it is probably a serial interface to the local controller at each site. The modem itself may have a microprocessor to do simple tasks like ensure the transmitter does not get stuck on by a fault or to prevent transmitting when the radio is receiving a signal already.

As far as the protocol goes, it can be anything and is probably something extremely simple: My address, length, payload, checksum.

webart• 11 years ago

So from now they don't have to worry about viruses.

downandout• 11 years ago

Back when I was in high school, I decided it would be cool to try to hack into the school computer system. I grabbed the white pages, figured out the range of numbers belonging to the school, and fired up my demon dialer.

Sadly, the only system that picked up was an HVAC control computer with no authentication. Apparently they figured that no one would find the number. After some experimentation, I was able to change the temperature in specific buildings where I went to class, which was neat for about a day. Anyway, this article makes me wonder if that system is still online.

relaxitup• 11 years ago

At the end of the TV news bit, the GRPS Maintenance Supervisor said something to the effect of "if we had to replace it tomorrow, we would be looking on ebay.. which is where this one came from.." This doesn't make sense if the Amiga has been running for 30 years and was purchased in the 80s. Perhaps he meant a failed part or accessory they had purchased that had failed.

spiritplumber2• 11 years ago

I don't know, Amigas are tough little critters. Part of it is that they're designed to load most of the OS in RAM and keep it there, so there are very few moving parts.

spiritplumber2• 11 years ago

Why am I not surprised that it's an Amiga?

I did a bit of work at NASA-AMES and they were just getting rid of Amiga 1000s used for video compositing.

damoncali• 11 years ago

When I worked on the Hubble Space Telescope in the late 90's I kept hearing the electrical guys talking about the new computer we were going to install. They called it simply, "the 486". I one day joked that I had had a 486 a few years ago in college and maybe they could use that and save some bucks. And they told me it was the same thing - literally an intel 486 processor. They said that the design happened to be very resistant to radiation, and met their purposes very well.

I haven't really kept up on it since, but I believe it's still running a humble 486. Granted, the rest of the machine isn't much like my old Dell, but I always found that interesting.

sliverstorm3• 11 years ago

If memory serves, older process technologies are intrinsically a little more rad-hard, just because a 1um 6T cell is roughly a hundred times larger than a 14nm 6T cell... (giving it greater drive strength and larger "ballast parasitics" to absorb radiation events)

They probably built them with a lot more margin back then too.

drzaiusapelord2• 11 years ago

Yep, that radiation hardened 486 was used quite a bit. I believe it was used for the Space Shuttle as well.

The Mars rovers have moved to a more efficient PowerPC platform, but its still old tech. Radiation hardening CPUs isn't cheap and the processing requirements for what these projects do isn't high (its more sane to just send the data to NASA and have terrestrial computers do all the heavy lifting), not to mention you don't run a bloated desktop OS on these things. A minimalist VxWorks RTOS is typically used.

Price? The RAD750 on the Curiosity Rover starts at about a quarter million dollars.

emp• 11 years ago

The Space Shuttle should be so lucky - 8086 (though I read 80386 for a cockpit upgrade). First flight 1981, predating the 486 (1989). It's interesting, NASA was raiding all sorts of old machinery to keep in stock of 8086s.

anocendi• 11 years ago

Hackerman exists afterall!

ape4• 11 years ago

There is nothing bad about a computer system lasting 30 years. If its the right kinds of system. Desktop computers like this one were never made for this kind of application.

sharjeel• 11 years ago

And here I am reading this article in 2015, with top of the page broken saying "Please install the latest Adobe Flash Player Plugin to watch this content."

brudgers6• 11 years ago

A successful application of agile methodology despite the term having been yet to be invented.

umanwizard• 11 years ago

Seattle's University Bridge was raised and lowered by an early-80s Compaq until recently.

http://blogs.seattletimes.com/today/2014/03/seattles-univers...

spacecadet• 11 years ago

1980's computers control most of manufacturing today.

noonespecial• 11 years ago

A 30-year-old computer that has run day and night for decades...

I know its a "ha-ha look at that antique" piece but seriously, how many computers could you buy at BigBox store today that will run for 30 years non-stop? The Amiga was just an off the shelf consumer PC.

williesleg• 11 years ago

I'll build the replacement for $800k

johntaitorg• 11 years ago

I thought this was going to be about a C64. You'd have to POKE it to switch the heating on.

It. Just. Works. though - they should never upgrade.

zuron7• 11 years ago

"Don't fix what's not broken."

1980s computer controls Grand Rapids Public School heat and AC

Related Stories