Did you ever wonder what Hell on earth would look like? Here you go.
Imagine having to rely on Windows XP, Windows 3.11, or even MS-DOS to get your daily work done. Imagine waiting 15 minutes for your computer to boot up so can get to work. Imagine the daily terror that your computer hardware might fail and that important tasks couldn’t get accomplished. Welcome to the life of people stuck in the netherworld of ancient technology.
These people aren’t working at Aunt Millie’s Yarn Shop; some serious infrastructure that we use everyday depends on this technology and is having a hard time escaping. Here’s just one anecdote from the article:
The trains in San Francisco’s Muni Metro light railway, for example, won’t start up in the morning until someone sticks a floppy disk into the computer that loads DOS software on the railway’s Automatic Train Control System (ATCS).
To get an idea of the problem, imagine what happens when SF Muni’s floppy drive fails. Are they even manufactured anymore? The SF Muni doubtless has spares but that’s just living on borrowed time.
Why not just upgrade, you say. It turns out that that’s much harder than you might imagine. Consider Scott Carlson who depends on CNC machines for his woodworking business. That machine was built around the time Windows XP came out and is tightly integrated with it. Carlson is a woodworker not an IT export so he’s pretty much stuck. Take a look at the linked article to see some of the other examples. Read it and be grateful that you don’t live in that world.