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the stuff made in the 90s are still used in hospitals and textile plants
Posted by legacy on 03 Oct, 2018 10:25 -
Talking about machine-vision (AI algorithms), the best comes with NVIDIA Tegra K1 SoC and uses the same Kepler computing core designed into supercomputers around the world. This gives you a fully functional CUDA platform for quickly developing and deploying compute-intensive systems for computer vision, robotics, medicine, and more.
Do you expect to find them in hospitals, quality control production, ... ? You will have a surprise.
I have recently seen an old SGI system(1) made in the 90s for quality control in production. Things like you assemble to components on the PCB with a pick & place machine, then it's wave soldered. Before handing the finished product to the customer, the assembly company will check the finished product. The can be done with X-ray but also using a camera and OCR to make sure components are placed correctly. Some things cannot be automated and have to be done manually. It also depends on the value of the card and the size of the production run.
Shocked? Read the followingQuoteYes, and the most extreme example of this I dealt with was a textile factory in Turkey that bought some systems from me way back. Their main knitting machine, a huge one for constructing very wide carpets, would have had to be replaced if they'd upgraded to the newer PC-based platform for managing the textile pattern files, costing a quarter of a million Euro. It was enormously cheaper just to upgrade their existing O2s and buy some more powerful maxed-out Octane2s.
A hospital in France told me something similar, replacing their SGI system with a PC for controlling a medical scanner would have required legal recertification of the scanner, taking many weeks and costing 50K Euro. Simply replacing the Indigo2 with another unit was a 200x cheaper.
Things do eventually get retired of course, but it can take a long time. A UK aerospace company I know has only just stopped using its R3000 IRIS Indigo systems, whereas a US company is still using a 12MHz Personal IRIS they bought from me for industrial process control. From a hospital in Barbados to a factory in Hiroshima, or even a small woollen clothing shop in Edinburgh (billbaber.com), SGIs are still used all over the place, lurking behind the scenes
(1) MIPS { R4K, R5K, R10K, R12K, R14K, R16L } CPU + OpenGL v1-v2 in hardware via dedicated GFX, large use of the NUMAflex and crossbar matrices to connect the CPUs to devices. -
sort of who cares, I guess
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As someone who works in plants and production facilities there is a much higher emphasis on reliability and maintaining throughput than there is on upgrading to the newest thing. When installing a new line or piece of equipment we get modern equipment or hardware but there is no real value in the bleeding edge. Much more cost effective to get something that has been on the market for five years and has been through some trial by fire before.
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Not surprised. I rather have a 30 YO machine reliably save my life than something that is made with agile programming, and it is still "ironing out the bugs".
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Went to the Dr not too many years ago and was a bit shocked that the ultrasound machine they used on me had a floppy drive. At least it was a 3.5 inch floppy...Quote
there is a much higher emphasis on reliability
Yeah, cause DOS machines with floppies have such a reputation for high reliability and maintainability. Given the usual state of of the medical care industry (in the US), I'll bet "someone" is paying more for the maintenance contract on that machine than a high-end Apple Fanboy spends on Brand New Hardware, each year.
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I know of a DEC LSI 11 still doing sterling service in a power plant, and you would be surprised at how much 1970s kit there is hiding in dark corners of heavy industry doing the same thing it did for the last 40 years with no attention whatsoever (Which is probably why it keeps working).
That maintenance contract is still probably orders of magnitude cheaper then getting a new code verified and certified for whatever that old dos box does, there can be a lot to be said for a simple single tasking machine that everyone is afraid to touch when it comes to basically unchanging jobs that must be done.
I also know a building owner who after having all sorts of problems with a new goods lift controller (Microprocessor based PLC thing that never did work correctly) wound up putting the old one (Electromechanical relays on a slate bed) back in, probably not exactly legal to reinstall the thing, but at least the lift worked!
Regards, Dan.
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In the US, Air Traffic Control radars run on kit using Intel 386 from the 90's. The FAA are spending $billions upgrading their kit, but a lot of the old stuff is going to be around for decades yet.
I suspect there is a huge amount of legacy (aka obsolete) kit around and a lot of it in critical infrastructure. -
Many years of old machinery service is, and has been normal in industry.
This is something the IT boys still need to understand. Life cycles under
5 years as envisaged in the IT industry are a joke. Rather expect 20 years +.
Like a non-IT related example?
A production line failure occurred in a large bakery. Quite few
technicians ran around, trying to find the faulty piece of equipment.
Then someone asked a retired worker. He said that there should be a
vacuum pump somewhere. It was finally found under a thick layer of
a mixture of flour, dust, gunk and moisture and had been providing service
for over 30 years with no maintenance at all. The specified maintenance
interval for oil changes was 2 years! -
Years ago I worked with a guy who worked at a place building ultrasound machines, they ran on hardware that was essentially Commodore Amiga motherboards.
My DSO and logic analyzer are ancient in computer terms and both have floppy drives, works fine for what they do.
Friends of mine run a machine shop and many of the CNC machines have 486 and early Pentium CPUs and run Win98 or Win2k embedded. Even if it's possible to upgrade, there's not really much point, the existing hardware still does the job.