On Monday, November 30, 2015 at 1:42:50 AM UTC-5, wrote:
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.,

Another issue is what it takes to fulfill one of these procurements. The RFQs are written to be so onerous that sometimes they don't get a compliant response. Then they'll lose the money and have to start over, which can take quite some time.

We did a huge state government project some years ago that was very specialized as compared to our standard offering. At the time we took it on we knew it would eat up the entire company's resources for over a year to develop and get it past the factory tests. That's exactly what happened. Now they've been trying to get a replacement system for the last few years. We no bid it, someone else got the project then defaulted on it. They're almost begging us, but we've gotten to the point that we aren't setup any longer to do that kind of one-off project. And it's probably worth $15-20M.