BoatBanter.com - View Single Post - 23 year old Win 3.1 system crashes Paris airport

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On Mon, 30 Nov 2015 00:15:08 -0500,
wrote:

I just knew that Win 3.1 was unreliable. :-)

http://www.zdnet.com/article/a-23-year-old-windows-3-1-system-failure-crashed-paris-airport/?ftag=YHR05c7fba

We used to find old Win 3.1 systems hidden away running critical
financial apps when doing our pre Y2K surveys.

If it works, why not?

What I didn't see was whether this was a software problem or just that
the hardware broke. I stopped running my DOS players (native DOS 6.3)
was because the socket 7 boards I was using and lost on the planet,
all had bad capacitors on them.

The strange thing is old w 3.1 apps usually run just fine under XP.
The problem is probably that there are no W/9x,XP or 7/8/10 drivers
for the hardware that is connected to that PC.
US air traffic control system was running on IBM 360/195s until very
recently, just because nobody wanted to stir up problems in a system
that is still doing the job.,

Your article also pointed out that these old systems are pretty much
hacker proof.