At my old workplace, there was numerous XP machines still going. They were running old machine equipment, and basically served as a controller for the entire machine.

As it turns out, it was cheaper to keep these XP stations, instead of buying a completely new Hydrolic press, or whatever it was running, which cost several hundred of thousands of dollars.

One day one of these computers stopped working, and we immediately tried to get the software to work on a brand new W10 replacement. Took us a week of drivers hell, until we eventually went to the basement, found an exact replica, and swapped the HDD over.

The company, making these heavy machineries, went bankrupt in the early 2000s, and there was literally no way of getting the software to run on anything besides that original box.

People keep saying to keep these XP machines off the internet. I seriously doubt there's much threat, especially for even older OS's like 98 and 95. It's the very devil just trying to browse with them, nothing much out there is going to be able to attack them. Security through obscurity indeed!

In any case, we're no longer in the Wild West days when people had machines hooked directly to the internet and a firewall was a third-party addon. LOL, ZoneAlarm anyone!

We all have a basic firewall built into our routers so unless you deliberately expose services you're fairly bulletproof to scanners. I remember scanning for Win2000 machines in blocks of IPs, long after it was defunct. Plenty were out there!

“Stuck”

Imagine being stuck using something that works for 30 years.

Right? If it still works then it still works.

If the article was talking about anything other than tech/software, we’d be praising its longevity.

You are forgetting targeted attacks. A blind attack would pretty much not have much of an effect indeed, however if the attacker knows the machine, then it's easy for the attackers to exploit these vulnerability if left "out in the open", and cause havoc, possibly create a lot of damages or leech informations pumped into those machines via old Windows installations.

I would totally hang with that lady in the thumbnail lol

For a business sure.

You wanna hack my dnd campaign and some pictures of my cock? Sure whatever dude. All financial and important shit goes through my phone anyway and that's likely to be hacked from the institutions I use.

They'll infect it and make it part of their DDoS bot swarm.

I set up a 32 bit Windows 7 VM so my dad could keep using his old drawing program that was built for Windows 3.11.

It was the last version of Windows to support 3.11 compabillity.

Works well.

lol what drawing program?

Stuck or preferred choice?

Trapped using software they needed to buy once, vs rent?

While that is awful and sucks. Again, probably won't really target me

If China or America use my machine as a member of their DDoS bot swarm likely I probably couldn't even fight back as much as I'd like. Either one of those countries could have backdoor bullshit into any system you think of.

If it is a nefarious third party maybe I want them to use my computer to attack the financial system of these capitalist regimes or to harm the infrastructure of an oppressive government.

Again, have my cock and dnd campaign. If my system runs slow and annoys me guess I'll deal with it. They already will get my information from the millions of sources compiling and collecting it.

I dunno doesn't really make me shake in my boots

I was tearing out ancient infrastructure for a new office and my eye kept going to a rectangular square box on the wall. Finally realized it was a PC! The cause of death was clear, PSU fan died, killed itself from heat. It was a form factor I had never seen, but standard nonetheless. It was running an answering machine system in DOS, still worked! Such a rare machine I've only found a single reference on the web and a single video about it. 1999, 486XS (I know, would kill for a DX, it's soldered on), upgraded from 2x 2MB SIMMs to a whopping 2x 64MB SIMMs. Imagine what that would have cost in the day!

LONG story, but I got it running Windows 95b. 3.1 was just too much challenge to get it networked and happy. Much pain was removed when I got a USB floppy emulator. Can't do jack without a floppy! Broke the network card drivers, need to start over. Had it running Doom with a legit SoundBlaster card and could RDP into over the network.

It was an amazing journey getting it all together and updated. Most of that knowledge is gone from the internet, and I sure don't remember all the tricks. Going to be my first token ring machine! LOL, had to get parts from Romania and trash cans.

I was tearing out ancient infrastructure for a new office and my eye kept going to a rectangular square box on the wall. Finally realized it was a PC! The cause of death was clear, PSU fan died, killed itself from heat. It was a form factor I had never seen, but standard nonetheless. It was running an answering machine system in DOS, still worked! Such a rare machine I've only found a single reference on the web and a single video about it. 1999, 486XS (I know, would kill for a DX, it's soldered on), upgraded from 2x 2MB SIMMs to a whopping 2x 64MB SIMMs. Imagine what that would have cost in the day!

LONG story, but I got it running Windows 95b. 3.1 was just too much challenge to get it networked and happy. Much pain was removed when I got a USB floppy emulator. Can't do jack without a floppy! Broke the network card drivers, need to start over. Had it running Doom with a legit SoundBlaster card and could RDP into over the network.

It was an amazing journey getting it all together and updated. Most of that knowledge is gone from the internet, and I sure don't remember all the tricks. Going to be my first token ring machine! LOL, had to get parts from Romania and trash cans.