Windows 7: Still looking after business (except when it isn't) In a welcome change from burger-based BSODing, here's Windows 7 tugging at the purse strings in a NatWest ATM in the East Midlands. Spotted by Register reader Dan in Buxton over the weekend, the ATM appears to be allowing passers-by a glimpse under the covers and revealing that Windows 7, the OS that Microsoft wishes to be …
My ATM (random asian bank) wanted me to login as Administrator, but no matter how often I pressed the screen, I wasn't allowed to do so - damn! I was allowed to withdraw money, though I was unable to read the screen for the message encouraging said Administrative login.
Eh-hmmm.
Heck! I'm STILL running OS/2 Warp on some of my legacy home-hobby machines! I even have one those old PS2 Model 80 server towers running a 386 processor running at 33 megahertz! With some BIOS mods and low-level electrical/soldering hardware upgrades, I'm running OS/2 Warp-4 on 64 MEGABYTES of RAM (not gigabytes --- megabytes!) and a 64 gigabyte SSD that the computer sees as multiple SCSI (using ATAPI) hard drives and it runs beeeaaautifully fast!
It is actually feels MUCH MORE responsive than my Windows 10 machine!
I'm running Lotus Spreadsheets on them and a really old version of XYwrite which I happen to really like as a early graphics-oriented word processor.
AND YES! I am ABLE to get Firefox Web Browser and Thunderbird Email running on it by getting rid of all the bloat code in my own source code fork so it does nothing but HTML5 ... using only 8 megabyte memory segments which can be swapped in an out for great OS responsiveness!
The majority reason for having such an old system working is to run Lotus spreadsheets because that spreadsheet STILL has functions that I DO NOT HAVE in Microsoft Excel which lets me do financial analysis that simply cannot be done anywhere else without large levels of programmer development funding !!! (Lotus was originally designed by financial types for program trading of call/put options and specialized commodities trades, leveraged buyouts, greenmail and poison pill calculations and Lotus had specialized functions that made life really easy for such activities!)
Technically, it was Lotus 123 that CAUSED the October 1987 Stock Market Crash because of it's built-in support for fast program trading calculations and call/put options tracking code!
Soooooooo, a system from 1990 (30 years ago!) is doing esoteric financial calculations in the year 2020 because Microsoft Excel STILL cannot support the higher level financial market-specific functions that make the programming of program trading actions and call/put options tracking code so easy to do on Lotus 123!
AND I should note that I am STILL running the ORIGINAL POWER SUPPLY with only the big capacitors replaced! That IBM Model 80 was INCREDIBLY solidly built --- It looks and feels like a tank!
Utterly solid and dependable!
My friend's VAX 9000 series system is the same way with his 30+ years old hardware and software that remains UTTERLY rock solid and dependable STILL RUNNING 32-bit vectorized financial systems code in the Year 2020 on multi-user access mode on incoming/outgoing low-bandwidth radio-modems (for the specialized satellite remote clients) and highly secretive and constricted-bandwidth specialty communications connections.
Sometimes the old gear REALLY IS so much better because of it's specialized purpose-built nature such that it MAKES FINANCIAL and TECHNICAL SENSE to keep it running as long as it can!
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I should ALSO NOTE when the ORIGINAL company paid for my IBM PS/2 Model 80 with all it's fancy gear and original SCSI drives, the total bill in 1990 came to around $35,000 US in 1990 dollars which is now about $69,000 US so those were EXPENSIVE systems in those days. I got it for free cuz the accountants had written it all down by 1999 to ZERO dollars and by company rules then had to DISCARD the equipment (i.e. throw it in the garbage!) I rescued all that server-class gear from an ignoble fate!
The VAX 9000 was originally bought by an oil and gas company in Calgary in 1991 for about three million dollars Canadian (with the vector processor options) plus a big fat support contract being extra and my friend got it all when he took over the company when they ran into financial difficulty. He's kept it ever since the late 90's/early 2000's and it's still going strong!
The late 1980's to early 1990's were the days when DEC and IBM had their sales personnel at their expense take your entire systems administration team out for dinner at a big Calgary Steakhouse and ply us all with very expensive food and drink to get Oil and Gas company systems people and management to buy-in on multi-million dollar mini-computers/super-servers and mainframes with their $250,000 to $500,000 a year service and technical support contracts!
I STILL have my DEC logo coffee cups and IBM Calgary 1988 Olympics Logo ski jacket swag!
Plus i do remember seeing my old boss signing a $250,000 CAN cheque to IBM for ONE YEAR of 24/7/365 technical support and emergency response services! (which came in handy a few times!)
on all that mainframe gear he bought (multiple IBM 3090 Model 600s) for about $15 Million Canadian!
The amount of money thrown about on computer gear in Calgary from 1987 to 1993 (i.e. before the Workstation-class Desktop PC revolution) was STUNNING! Almost every week in local Oil and Gas trade magazines, I was hearing about 1, 2, 3, 5, 10, 15 and 30 million dollar IBM and DEC computer systems going into the big boy Shell, Petro Canada, Chevron, Imperial Oil, PanCanadian, etc mainframe-oriented computer departments for oil and gas reservoir modelling work.
It was a GLORIOUS TIME to be a mainframe salesperson AND a systems administrator where pay was ridiculously high and everyone was wined and dined by multiple sales teams! A time where a 10% or even a 15%-to-20% commission on the total sale was not unheard of which is WHY some of the IBM and DEC sales team members were driving Ferrari GTS Turbos and Lamborghini 25th Anniversary Edition Countaches as their daily drivers!
Some of those Salespersons I knew at the time were 25 year old multimillionaires within 3 years of joining the mainframe sales teams straight out of university computer science! (you had to have a four year Comp-Sci degree to be an IBM/DEC mainframe sales person!)
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@Stargate
Just wondering: could you not provide the functions you miss from Lotus in the form of an Excel plug-in and profit?
Icon: I had A level Maths students doing investigations on old 286 based DOS computers as noone else in the college wanted them. The students liked a change from the symbolic work. Memories.
I will not dispute with you the robustness of the old hardware and OS. You are preaching to the choir.
What annoys me, is that in the 30-odd years since your system was sold, there seems to have been NO IMPROVEMENT
(And, in fact, a good deal of backsliding in the robustness department)
However, we do have "the ribbon", and the ability to embed online video into our Word documents, so we've got that going for us, which is nice...
The scary part is that I use my XYwrite software on OS/2 Warp 4 almost EXCLUSIVELY for ALL my internal corporate memos and correspondence (for clients I just export as RTF or early versions of DOC) because I am so familiar with it. I am also so used to Lotus 123 macro programming that I am pretty sure I can use and make this IBM Model 80 OS/2 Warp 4 system last ANOTHER 30 years!
Hardware-wise, I've been replacing the chemical capacitors with ceramic ones on BOTH the power-supply AND the motherboard itself. The motherboard is EASY to update/fix because it is NOTHING like today's ultra-crowded, multi-layered, micro-component nightmares.
I've got a plentiful supply of RAM chips and I bought a bucket load of 64 gigabyte SCSI/ATAPI-based SSD's for really cheap so I will always have basic components available for replacement. AND I also bought lots of used HDTV 1080p displays with the XGA-compatible (1024 by 768 pixel) 15-pin analog connectors on them so the system will always have monitors. (again, I just replace the capacitors on them and the large interior LCD lamp with components I bought from base component suppliers)
I also have these external SCSI drives that burn my data onto a special type of metallic non-polymer 4.7 GB DVD-ROM media that is guaranteed to last 1000 years (i.e. was guaranteed for that long before they went bust!) by it's original manufacturer. I've got a LOT of them blank discs in well protected storage and since a lot of my data is only text files and small-size one megabyte or less JPEG images, my storage space is NOT an issue for onsite and offsite temp-controlled permanent archive and restore purposes! I've also got lots of power supply components.
Seriously! This Model 80 is SO WELL BUILT, I KNOW I can make it last until the Year 2050!
I ain't giving up my XYwrite, Lotus 123 and dBase-IV without a hard fight! I run my whole life off those old things! AND I have a TONNE of IBM REXX-based command/batch files that do all sorts indexing, searching, and processing of personal and business documents, multi-language text and other computer-based records and long-lived databases!
Plus I do all my on-line text-only based news, sports, politics and gossip aggregation that creates my OWN version of the PDB (President's Daily Briefing) of ANYTHING that I consider important from hundreds of websites which uses a custom-built HTML-5 only version of Firefox compiled for Warp-4 that scours a list of MANY websites and news sources! I even have a custom PDF reader/writer with JPEG image and PostScript support on OS/2 Warp that stores my text and graphic documents in the simplest manner possible designed for FAST indexing, search and display !!!
I ain't throwing all that long-term familiarity, hard work and PRECISION fine-tuning away just because of the introduction of Windows-10 up to to Windows-2525 or MacOS-ZZ Cretin Edition !!!
NO WAY HOZAY !!!!!
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AND for those of you wondering, I'm part of a legacy computer preservation hobbyist group that like to repair, upgrade and use old computer gear. SOME of the club members even still use their old IBM PC-ATs, IBM RISC-6000's, MicroVaxes, DECstations and Sun Workstations for their DAILY work and/or research because they are ALL old fuddy-duddies who happen to like things to STAY the way they are in their computing systems! They DON"T WANT to change over to Windows 10 or MacOS or Linux or Android/iOS! They want their old-style DOS, THEOS, VAX VMS, AIX, Solaris or OS/2 with the simplified graphics interface or highly-tuned command line interface !!!
They TEND to be very long-time COBOL, BASIC, FORTRAN, PROLOG, LISP, C/C++, PASCAL or ADA programmers that still do cutting edge modern scientific research ranging from plasmadynamics and nuclear physics to astronomy to gene therapy BUT they want to stay with their old-style toolsets!
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I personally use almost EVERY modern and legacy operating system and hardware configuration under the sun BUT I still REALLY LIKE my early 1990's-era IBM Model 80 x386 running OS/2 Warp and my REALLY SIMPLE word processor, spreadsheet and database programs that I have been so familiar with since the 1980's!
Why should I have to give up all that familiarity and time learning all those macros and batch files?
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I even like THE SMELL of that old IBM Model 80 tower! It has a Bakelite half metallic/half plastic familiar SMELL to it when the 386 is being pushed to its limit (i.e. put a modified but modern large-fin heat sink on it!)
I think it's actual the RAM chips because they have that THICK and SMOOTH bakelite casing on them that is so tough as nails and it's just COMFORTING to have that tiny whiff of plastic/metal off-gas which tells me that a 30 year piece of technology is STILL going strong!
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The OTHER THING I NOTICE is that IBM OS/2 Warp-4 is SMOOTH and non-complex!
My Windows 10 Enterprise machines mouse cursor and keyboard jitter and stutter even though I've got 256 gigabytes up to two terabytes of system RAM. YES! I know I've got 200 windows open and AM running a petabyte-scale volumetric video render on them BUT can they at the very least NOT run the mouse, keyboard and other HID (Human Interface Devices) in general threads that keep getting interrupted by other tasks?
The Warp-4 system has ALWAYS been utterly smooth no matter what windows and background tasks I am running! Nothing jitters or stutters and even surfing the web, it's all sooooo much SMOOTHER than that ridiculous Windows 10 system with its giant amounts of RAM and disk space! I am pretty sure it's NOTHING but code bloat because my Warp-4 is using less than 16 MEGABYTES of RAM in its entirety and my XYwrite is less than 7 megabytes in size in memory! I have enough system RAM for a 1000 page thesis at 13 point New Century Schoolbook with a few large bitmap and vector diagrams in it and it is ALL running FAST and SMOOTH unlike my Windows-10 equivalents that jitter and stutter just to move 4 pages ahead or back!
WHY cannot not have the SMOOTHNESS of OS/2 in Windows-10?
WHY does my Office software say it's using 7 GIGABYTES of RAM and my WEB BROWSER is at 11 Gigabytes and my CAD/CAM/FEA system say its using 28 gigabytes and 128 Gigabytes of scratch space?
The SAME three TYPES of applications (older word processor, browser, CAD/CAM application OS/2-specific executables) on Warp-4 use less than 48 MEGABYTES (NOT Gigabytes --- MEGABYTES!) in total? What is with all the modern code bloat in every OS made today ???
Unclear why POSReady is mentioned. An ATM is not a point of sale.
A better link would be this one, that shows that support for Windows 7 Pro can actually be obtained until 2023:
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4497181/lifecycle-faq-extended-security-updates
So absent more details, this doesn't look like the greatest journalistic scoop ever.
Now, when I was recently waiting in an hospital ER, I spotted workstations running XP and Vista. Time for ElReg to visit hospitals to check how their health is taken care of?
Win7, an OS that has been around long enough to have the bulk of the bugs ironed out, versus Win10, an OS that breaks every single time MS tries to update it, and you wonder why someone might want to run the stable version instead of the one buggier than a swarm of mosquitos?
*Blows a feisty raspberry as I taunt you like a Frenchman atop the castle walls*
=-)p
I might be the last person to find this out, but my son, a Middle Ages buff, tells me this is a literal translation of a real insult: your mother is a whore (hamsters apparently being though highly sexually active) and your father is a drunk (most contemporary wine being made from elderberries).
Most contemporary cheap wine being made from elderberries
Indeed. The well-off and/or aritsocratic would have drunk their imported red wine. The less well off would have drunk small beer or ale (or, if they were paticularly fortunate enough to know a beekeeper, mead.
Except that hamsters weren't a Middle Ages pet in Blighty. In fact, they weren't recognized by Western Science until the mid 1800s ... and weren't actually bred in Europe until the late 1930s. I suspect that a middle-ages insult based on supposed promiscuity would be more lagomorphic in nature.
As for smelling of elderberrys, other than the obvious[0], this could have two meanings. In the first, the bruised leaves, stems and unripe fruit of the elder have a rather awful smell sometimes described as fetid, thus "your dad stinks!". In the second, the flowers and ripe fruit have a rather sweet smell, suggesting a woman's perfume, thus "your dad is effeminate!".
Note that drinking too much elderberry wine doesn't actually make you smell of elderberrys; it just makes you stink like a drunk. If you don't believe me, it's easy enough to try for yourself ... but try to find a wine that is fermented out, and has little residual sugar. That'll minimize the hangover, which can be horrendous with this kind of plonk. Don't say I didn't warn you. Like most of the poor in the Middle Ages, I suggest sticking to Ale.
[0] The obvious being the Knight is French and is demonstrating his poor ability with idiomatic English, in typical Pythonesque fashion. In other words, the insult was made up by the Pythons for the sketch and had no actual place in history. Hold the Holy Handgrenades, I'm leaving of my own accord.
Win7, an OS that has been around long enough to have the bulk of the bugs ironed out
You might think that, but there's little evidence to support it. In addition, as any developer will tell you, a bug fix can introduce new bugs.
But it's not as if Windows 10 doesn't contain much of the same code as Windows 7 and should largely benefit from the same "bug fixes". And, I can't believe I'm actually defending MS here, but it does have some architectural improvements and more managed code, which should hopefully mean fewer exploits due to code going rogue and the proposed containers are another step in this direction.
However, the most important thing here is that we're talking about embedded devices here so things like physical access (USB ports) and communication upstream are perhaps more important than whether they can be pwned by viewing a particular web page.
doing corporate taxes, installed tax software "from major software house" and it acted like GWX, trying to get me to "upgrade to windows 10" !!! It just *HAD* to "warn me" that Windows 7 no longer had security updates, etc.. *TWICE* !!!
If they want *MY* business THAT! SOFTWARE! HOUSE! WILL! CONTINUE! TO! SUPPORT! RUNNING! ON! WINDOWS! 7! WITHOUT! HAVING! TO! USE! A! CLOUD-BASED! VERSION!!!
Just thought I'd point that one out. The major software house in question starts with an "In" and ends with a "tuit"... (and I've heard they code in JAVA, so WHAT the *BLANK* ???)
"Hey, Java is a good programming language to develop server apps"
Sure, if you have unlimited memory, CPU cores and still don't mind it running at half the speed of something written in C++. Oh, and you don't want to write a multi process system as opposed to multi threaded. Apart from that, yeah , Java is a 1st rate server language especially given how many cheap couldn't-hack-their-way-out-of-a-wet-paper-bag offshore halfwits use the language.
I don't bother with JAVA anymore .... I MOSTLY USE ADA or LAZARUS/DELPHI PASCAL for my GUI, CLIENT/SERVER and REAL-TIME systems work. I kinda need strongly typed languages and massive amounts of error checks cuz an errant missile defence system that can send 2 kg up to 4000 kg rods of Stainless Steel, Tungsten and/or ceramic at 5000+ rounds per minute at 160,000 kmh up into high-orbit space might be a tad bit of a NASTY PROBLEM to have when an error message dialog box suddenly popups on-screen waiting for user input!
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When I started University back in 1978[1] they had one of the "swap your card for a Tenner" machines embedded in the wall of the Stunted Onion[2] building.
Being from "up 't north" I'd never seen such a contraption and was duly impressed., and therefore had to resort to having my gast flabbered when I discovered the electro-mechanical marvel that was the Barclay's ATM in the High Street. That thing was magnificent. With a (presumably) rubberised canvas belt that whirred back & forth displaying instructions, big buttons you just about had to hit with a hammer to get it to register your intentions, and a serving hatch that opened to dispense piles of wrinkly Fivers. To this day I am convinced that it was operated by a team of handle-cranking clerks while an accountant sat to one side and updated the ledgers in real time using a quill pen...
1) While Pterodactyls wheeled overhead, and Velocoraptors feasted on the bones of Doug McClure[3]
2) Yes. It really said that. Points if you can identify the institute of higher learning in question.
3) If you're going to be anachronistic, you may as well do it properly.
I was once involved in the development of an "optical disk jukebox". No, not one of those neat little multi-CD things that eventually found their way into cars, but a huge box with dimensions in meters that moved platters the size of NY pizzas around and in and out of the disc drives.
Anyway, the point is that I costed out all the HW and SW and concluded that for the same amount of money they could have had minimum wage drones doing essentially the same work for a couple of years.
... might crunch a bit (or bits) of your local mechanic if it fails. The mechanic is fully aware of the state of his jack, and sees no real need to have it inspected. (Does any government actually have a Department of Floor Jack Inspection? Wouldn't surprise me, in today's "please protect me from myself because I'm stupid and I like it that way" society ... )
When Windows fails in a POS (or other "used by the masses" system), there is a non-zero chance that it will compromise the financial security of the intended end-user.
Spot the difference and win a beer.
Sounds like a terrible state of affairs, AGD ... Around there here parts, the owner IS the mechanic ... at least at garages I frequent. There is less overhead when the owner doesn't need or want a manicure, and the savings are passed on to the customer.
I'll never understand why ATMs, ticket machines and the like run Windows. It's literally insane. There's no technical benefit of doing so, it makes the system more insecure, and it adds an unnecessary cost (Windows license fee). Why won't these banks just put together a minimal Linux distro of their own, and put that on the machines? Then they can enable / disable exactly what they want in the kernel, and have no superfluous system services running in the background, saving money on electricity because of lower CPU usage... Their systems would run cooler too, so maybe they wouldn't even need a fan. They could put a Raspberry Pi behind those ATM screens and it would probably run better than their current setup. I swear to god it's a suit making the decision to go with Microsoft in these situations, not an IT person. Why not just literally throw money down the toilet instead? It's a faster and more efficient waste of resources, since that seems to be what they're going for.
These companies need to hire more people with actual IT competence.
"These companies need to hire more people with actual IT competence"
They do exist. The problem is they are still a small minority running around fixing everything making up for stupid decisions made at higher levels from people who actually sign off on choices and purchases made from reading from shiny powerpoints presented by vendors and consultancies.
Because they're banks, and they just DO NOT take security as seriously as they should. From ATMs running Windows, to not cross-checking payee against actual account holder when transferring money (in the UK at least), to still having Flash on their websites. They only care about their share prices and bonuses. They allow fraud to take place and will do everything to avoid paying up even when their self-written code of conduct says they should. So installing Windows on the ATMs probably involved some sort of stupid decision based solely on money.
Recently using a self-serve till in Sainsburys and about a dozen items in - blue screen - Options to reboot in safe mode and, since I had no keyboard to fiddle with, a reboot in normal mode. Windows 7 EPOS splash screen displayed. Cashier said that it would take seven minutes to reboot so use another till!
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