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
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.
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 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
