This reboot time sounds absurd until you hear the tech stacks running on these trains. I don't remember the details, but it was real Rube Goldberg stuff. Something like System 7 code running on a soft PLS because the real PLS is EOL but the soft PLS can only run on Windows 95 so you run a virtual Windows 95 on top of some obscure hypervisor, and I think there might be another layer to the story as well. Just anything to avoid changing the actual code that runs the train because that would trigger a recertification process.
Well, perhaps multitasking systems would even be worse at IO than DOS. Not entirely sure here...
MS-DOS is actually amazingly small by modern measures, it offers less features than many modern RTOS'es - it's basically file system, program loader and _maybe_ some interface points for 3rd party drivers. Display, audio, external devices - it's all up to your software to decide. Your MS-DOS display driver will never break because MS-DOS does not provide display drivers.
This is good for keeping things running as long as you don't need to upgrade hardware.
I ran MS-DOS in an airport for several years and it was just fine. Windows 2000 was available, but not needed for the task at hand, while a reboot was way faster with MS-DOS than any Windows at that time and a reset was the solution for 99% of the incidents, the rest was hardware-related.
In terms of replacements, a Raspberry Pi would be more than enough in terms of computing power, with some decent (non-microSD) local storage. Cheap, simple and I guess the cost of writing the MS-DOS app from scratch should cost about the same as that admin for 1 year.
You can find some oddball stuff on AliExpress that’s probably made to replace as close as possible 1to1 EOL equipment: https://youtu.be/6bODiZ5bP84?si=GTwF6MOQqm_VLy4s
I wish they showed the UI. I'd love to see if it's more elegant / information dense / etc.
60 points by mfiguiere on Jan 27, 2024 | hide | past | favorite | 49 comments
But the value in malware is not having a single system crash, but having a worm spread. I would assume these systems are directly connected to whatever system feeds them and not to anything else, to mitigate risk.
