<story><title>1980s Amiga has been running the AC and heat in 19 schools for 30 years</title><url>https://www.geek.com/news/commodore-amiga-computer-has-been-running-the-acheat-in-19-schools-for-30-years-1625147/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>_ldkd</author><text>So much to say about this. One is the optics of employing students three decades ago, another is the remarkable faith they put into one at the time - which appears to have been well founded.  Today, this sort of thing would never happen.&lt;p&gt;But overall, I get the feeling that people today are afraid of things they can&amp;#x27;t vendor out, things they can&amp;#x27;t replace cookie-cutter style.  Sometimes that concern is justified, when you think in terms of support spanning decades, but overall I see it as a vertical integration of bureaucracy all around us.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s not just this control system, it&amp;#x27;s everything.  Was it Caltrans that hit a modernization roadblock because the agency hand-built railway sensors and circuits around that same time and now can&amp;#x27;t find replacement parts because people don&amp;#x27;t build things in-shop anymore?</text></item><item><author>samfisher83</author><text>In the article it says the system was programmed by a highschool student 30 years ago. Now the replacement cost is 1.5-2 million.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>coldtea</author><text>&amp;gt;&lt;i&gt;So much to say about this. One is the optics of employing students three decades ago, another is the remarkable faith they put into one at the time - which appears to have been well founded. Today, this sort of thing would never happen.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;What remarkable faith? It&amp;#x27;s a program to start&amp;#x2F;stop AC&amp;#x2F;heat units based on temperatyre readings, not to send people to Mars.&lt;p&gt;A talented high school student can write one today, and do it with a Rasberry Pi and for much less than $1 million (more like 5-10K).&lt;p&gt;Not as a student, but as a temp in a secondary education unit, I maintained and updated the payroll system used to pay ~50 schools and over 1000 teachers every month. It was a VB&amp;#x2F;MS SQL thing written by another temp a few years earlier, but it did the job.</text></comment>
<story><title>1980s Amiga has been running the AC and heat in 19 schools for 30 years</title><url>https://www.geek.com/news/commodore-amiga-computer-has-been-running-the-acheat-in-19-schools-for-30-years-1625147/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>_ldkd</author><text>So much to say about this. One is the optics of employing students three decades ago, another is the remarkable faith they put into one at the time - which appears to have been well founded.  Today, this sort of thing would never happen.&lt;p&gt;But overall, I get the feeling that people today are afraid of things they can&amp;#x27;t vendor out, things they can&amp;#x27;t replace cookie-cutter style.  Sometimes that concern is justified, when you think in terms of support spanning decades, but overall I see it as a vertical integration of bureaucracy all around us.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s not just this control system, it&amp;#x27;s everything.  Was it Caltrans that hit a modernization roadblock because the agency hand-built railway sensors and circuits around that same time and now can&amp;#x27;t find replacement parts because people don&amp;#x27;t build things in-shop anymore?</text></item><item><author>samfisher83</author><text>In the article it says the system was programmed by a highschool student 30 years ago. Now the replacement cost is 1.5-2 million.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>wrs</author><text>Three (oh crap, closer to four) decades ago our high school minicomputer (DG Nova 2) handled all the grade reporting, class and athletics schedules, and alumni development mailings — all programmed and operated by a few students, in BASIC no less. It was a rare and invaluable experience to be essentially a trusted professional at that age.</text></comment>