Why create e-waste and spend money you don’t have to when your existing retro hardware not only works fine but gives customers something to talk about?
I wish more people thought this way.
No, I’m all against e-waste, but the whole “if it ain’t broke” mentality is asinine, that’s how we end up with bullshit like the entire financial system of the country being underpinned by an ancient mainframe program written in COBOL and is a huge reason we STILL need to wait DAYS for transactions to process because it can’t handle Real-time transactions. That’s the result of a generation or 2 of executives going “If iT aINt BrOKe”
Retired that shit and repurpose it to teach kids the BASICs of programming or something.
The quote should be changed to “If it ain’t broke, evaluate the modern options available and determine if it will truly improve things and switch to that if so”
That’s not an example of working fine, now is it?
I hope whatever put you in such a foul mood gets better.
That’s not an example of working fine, now is it?
Try convincing non-IT executives of that who absolutely LOVES that stupid phrase when trying to get funding approved to update some 20 year old system sometime
Exec:“Why update and spend money, when the old system works fine?”
Well it technically works, but our customers expect a modernized system that doe—
Exec: “So it works then, iF iT AInT BrOkE…”
To me it’s the tech equivalent of painting yourself into a corner, sure it works at the moment but what are the hidden costs of sticking on a dead end technology? What’s the upgrade path from a C64, a C128? What happens if a chip on the circuitboard fails, or the power supply? Can’t exactly order a new one, they stopped making them over 30 years ago and the company has been defunct for basically the same amount of time.
I wish I could remember more details, but I remember years ago reading about a company that had a core product that depended on an old 286 era laptop with a special software/hardware combo for maintenance, and all I could think of was that a single accidental bump of a table was all it’d take to shut down that product for months until they could find the exact replacement.
Actually c64 replacement parts are pretty affordably available these days and easily maintainable due to the comparable simplicity Vs modern computing hardware. One of the advantages of the age of hobbiest computing - the designs used widely available ICs that you can just buy and assemble on your kitchen table with a soldering iron.
the reason transactions take so long is because of compliance. COBOL, CICS (the tramsaction manager) and mainframes themselves are constantly being updated and optimized because no flavor of the week in the last three decades has been able to handle the throughput needed by the companies that still use them. if anything in the tech stack at banks is slowing down your paycheck getting cashed, it’s the small army of nodeJS servers whose entire codebase gets rewritten every six months because some exec thinks COBOL isn’t sexy enough and we can get rid of it we say the word “agile” enough. the fortune 500 has been planning on being “off the mainframe in the next 3 years” since the 90s
Yes. COBOL instructions map nearly directly (something like 1:4) to machine language instructions on the mainframe chipsets it was built for. It strongly encourages stateless procedures with its design, and has some other benefits that align closely with the financial sector. You can drop down to assembly as a hot spot optimization if you really need to.
The industry could replace COBOL, but its replacement would wind up looking a lot like COBOL at the code structure level, or a slightly nicer language would have an intermediate transpile step into COBOL or something similar. Probably no performance gains. Perhaps some usability gains. Not enough to sell it as a rewrite.
Reality is its use will probably outlive us all.
In the meantime let’s fire up some AS400 (yes I know, it’s called IBM i or whatever now nobody cares)
I know north American c64s had power supply issues and I think capacitor issues. I imagine the latter is true there as well, though not sure about the former
The C64 Mini and C64 Maxi are readily available today and affordably priced, making spare parts easily accessible.
If those work well enough for them, I cannot see any benefit of upgrading.
How do they save transactions reliably? To floppy? Or tape?
What if the disk/tape is full.
I love it, but seems a bit flakey
They probably don’t and it’s just for pricing and printing receipts…
I guess they could record the sales using carbon copy receipt paper.
Realistically it only needs to hold info for the day. It’s a bakery. They just need to know how much money should be in the cash drawer.
What are those symbols printed on the side of the keycaps?
