Nothing to do with brain eating ones, however. I started a new job recently, in a field different than any I've worked in before. One of the things I noticed at this new job was that they had some machines dating from the '70s. The company that made those machines has been gone for decades now, and I figured that my new employer had scooped them up cheap when they started the company as an easy way to get their foot in the door. I did some googling on the machines the other day and discovered that even though the company which made them is long gone, they're still the industry standard machines, and there's a number of companies out there that rebuild and refurbish the machines. Which got me to thinking, that in every machine shop I've worked in, there were machines made by long-dead companies that are still being used, and like the machines in my current place of employment, there are whole industries which support those machines. It made me wonder, how many other industries are there that still use "ancient" gear made by companies that are no longer around? I mean, can you imagine a taxi company using AMC Ambassadors as cabs? Or a hospital that has pre-WWII X-ray machines that they still use? In one of the shops I worked in, we had machines which dated back to 1918! They didn't sit and gather dust, either, but were used almost daily. Anybody know of industries that use ancient tech from long-dead companies?
Fascinating! And no, outside of the occasional Win 95 boxes being used in a retail setting (think bottle returns in states with bottle deposits), I can't think of anything.
Not quite the same thing you're talking about, but we took so long to convert from digital tape cameras to solid state media that Sony just about quit supporting the equipment we used. They still sold replacement parts, but at very high prices. It was easier and cheaper to buy whole cameras and tape machines on evilBay in order to cannibalize them for a single part we might need than to pay what Sony wanted for replacement parts.
OMG, I remember when I worked for Pepsi and was on their inventory database team. I got put there because someone thought having networking knowledge meant I knew Database programming. This was just at the point of HS constantly on data becoming popular. The bottling plants didn't need a constant connection. Overnight they were using 300 and 900 baud modems to upload their daily batches through their servers. I get they did not want to spend the money to upgrade, but they had to be spending millions to administer that system at that point. I was not in a position to argue, but having been in a number of IT supplying businesses it was a shock to see how Pepsi was being help together by some pretty old tech. I wish I could have gotten a job supporting it. Granted it would have been older and semi frustrating, but it would have been fun to go around and work with.
