When BART first carried passengers, the country was sending astronauts to the moon. The Apollo-era trains were symbols of a generation barreling toward a space-age future complete with carpeted floors and a seat promised to every passenger.
That was 1972, when BART was state of the art. But half a century later, as the agency celebrates its 50th anniversary this month, many of those same silver-and-blue trains are still chugging through the Bay Area. And keeping them running — even in the country’s technology capital — requires a special breed of ingenuity.
BART mechanics rely on Frankensteined laptops operating with Windows 98, train yard scraps and vintage microchips to keep Bay Area commuters on the rails.
These stories are a dime a dozen, and serve to illustrate there’s a lot more outdated tech out there in our daily lives than we think. On the flipside, that’s some decent job security for the engineers and maintenance crew involved.
“So you have to take Windows 10 and open up a virtual Windows 98 box and then run the (DOS) program to download the log files,”
A few years ago I,’ve been trying to use 98/Me and VBox to play Old games, but even desktop was slów as crap. Is Hyper-V any better?
I think vbox has timing issues.. that cause it to seem slow in OSes not designed to be visualized or that at least don’t cope well.
More recent straight up emulators like 86box can pretty much emulate P166-200 class machines fully emulated with no virtualization.
There must be more to having to run legacy a DOS program from a virtualized instance of Windows 98. Maybe some kind of a Windows 98 specific driver or some configuration that was saved within the VM and is hard to replicate.
I have only run into one program that did not work well under the normal Windows 10 command prompt, and I managed to run it from DOSBox with no additional configuration.
Anything 16bit would require WINEVDM to run on anything later than windows 7 32bit.
An example would be a soft PLC like Think & Do which is flow chart based control logic etc… integrated with an HMI.
It can definitely work on windows 7 32bit… but its possible people not aware would think you had to run it on exact original hardware when in reality you just need an serial card + whatever IO hardware. And those exist for modern OSes.
The article seems pay-walled?
Nope, it isn’t.
You’re probably using an advert blocker like every sane person does; and got the “Here’s our subscription plans” pop-up because the site detected that adverts are blocked.
The solution is the same solution you use for pay-wall sites: close the browser window ASAP and swear in an attempt to convince yourself that the world hasn’t devolved into a festering pile of shit; and never return to that web site ever again.
This is also a testament about the amount of investment that goes into public mass transport in the US, even in places like California.
While I agree on the “don’t fix it if it ain’t broken” philosophy and generally things not having to be thrown away to be replaced by the trendy shiny of the day as long as they still work, it looks like more serious lifecycle management / maintenance agreements and provisions should have been planned for, rather than relying on heroics alone.
Well, the article actually says at the end that renovation of the fleet is ongoing, so it’s not so bad. Hopefully for the next generation of BART these concerns will be better known and handled better.
Heroics often cost more than just doing basic maintenance.
Introduction: I like to watch the long railway quietly by myself, and it seems that the twists and
https://www.blogsandarticlesonline.com
Honestly, the fact that key infrastructure remains reliant on old (presumably very reliable) software doesn’t seem like that big of an issue to me. There are always emulators, and of course as they mention in the article, stacks of old laptops that can run old OSes. It’s just not that big of a deal that something’s still on DOS. It’s much more concerning that the hardware that these trains need is no longer available, and that engineers are having to scrounge for old chips and perform epic hardware hacks. It’s yet another example of the truism that a complex system is only as good as the logistics, inventory management, and maintenance organization that exists to support it. It’s something that doesn’t get a lot of the spotlight, until it obviously fails, and brings the whole house of cards down with it.
The trouble starts… when every laptop in your stack is dead and won’t boot!
Still its often at a point were its a bit too complicated to reverse engineer for most , and most people aren’t use to low level programming to begin with so…. yeah.
If industrial controller manufacturers were to go defunct it would be a major $$$ issue….. Most of those end up in service for say 20 years with little maintenance (maybe a IO controller goes bad etc…. but you usually have a spare on the shelf or you should).
David Adams,
Win 98 was notoriously unstable though. I don’t know if you remember how common blue screens were. And then on boot it would frequently force slow disk scans even when the user did a proper shutdown., a bug that still continues now for some running it in a VM…
https://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?t=65974
In that era you’d frequently see gas station and airport displays with blue screens, it could happen to anyone. I imagine BART is either tolerant of such bugs, or they’ve perfected the mitigations needed to keep it running smoothly. In other words, it’s fragile but it won’t crash as long as they as they don’t provoke it, haha.
Hardware sourcing is a problem, as you indicate. I was still supporting a DOS product into 2020, but it become harder and harder to source hardware. I thought it was a sure sign that they should port the software to a modern system, after all real mode memory limits were a major source of frustration too. Yet they just wanted to keep it running as is. Eventually we did emulate it under a linux VM to solve the hardware sourcing problems. Emulation wasn’t trivial though because there was serial IO used by code that was very intolerant of timing delays & jitter. DOS applications generally assumed nothing else is running.
Whether it is DOS/mainframes/win98/etc, there are tons of companies running legacy software to save money by not having to port/redevelop the software. Still I can’t help but wonder whether the maintenance and business inefficiency costs are sufficiently accounted for. Sometimes I think IBM hardware & licensing costs alone cost as much as it would to rewrite the software for commodity FOSS systems. Whatever floats their boats though, haha.
This is also a warning story for developing everything in house, instead of using off the shelf parts.
Even the trains themselves don’t use the “two horsed carriage” standard sized rails: https://www.precisioncontent.com/blog/on-rocket-ships-and-horses-behinds-where-did-your-content-standards-come-from/, hence if a train car fails, they will have to custom make the repairs. There are no other companies that will provide service for you.
A unique system comes with unique set of problems.
sukru,
To be fair though, many companies & products go defunct whether you do it in house or not. For example, back in 98 it wasn’t uncommon for projects to incorporate “off the shelf” 3rd party OCX controls, but I actually think outsourcing can add a great deal of long term risk if you create dependencies on 3rd party components that you have little control over. Had you rolled your own at least you would own & control the code. Granted FOSS does mitigate this, but it was not the norm for windows software back then.
BTW I read your post through the lense of software but you probably meant only hardware. I do have concerns over 3rd party hardware vendors “john deerifying” the industry, intentionally adding road blocks to self sufficiency. It’s becoming a huge problem for owners of farm equipment and home appliances, although I don’t know how big of a problem this is for entities like BART?
Alfman,
You are probably right. Those who bought Delphi 6 and custom components, are stuck between a rock and a hard place: https://supportcenter.devexpress.com/ticket/details/q474219/components-for-delphi-6
Anyway, a better wording probably: using standard components, or having multiple suppliers.
If I build something with LiFePO4 batteries, F2 terminals, 3d printed PLA chassis from STL files, raspberry pi, array of sensors, camera, step motors, etc. I have no worries this can be replicated in the future. Even the raspberry pi is a de-facto standard with many clones on the market.
And I would argue if one has to go for a single supplier for some reason I would ask source code access. Even Microsoft will share Windows source code for large enough customers: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/sharedsource/
(Side note: Individual farms unfortunately have no recourse against a large company. But them coming together plus some government action, and change is already happening: https://www.deere.com/en/our-company/repair/)
sukru,
Have you read the terms though? Even accepting that it’s a proprietary license and even accepting the fact that it is highly discriminatory, the restrictions in place make the “shared source” virtually useless for real world software development.
Even those meeting the unreasonable eligibility requirements for “shared source” can’t do anything with it. It doesn’t matter that you don’t intend to use the source code in your product at all and only want to use it for debugging and application compatibility, it’s expressly prohibited unless it’s an internal application. So although I agree with your point, I don’t don’t consider microsoft’s program even remotely adequate for the needs we are describing here.
I hate seeing owners being stripped of their rights and access to their own property. It will be interesting to see how things work out in the long run. Whether it’s farm equipment, cars, computers, mobiles, etc, it remains unclear to me that owner rights can match or overturn the trends towards consolidation of power at the top. Will we be able to overcome imbalances or is this a permanent feature of capitalism? Personally I tend to think these imbalances are self-reinforcing in the absence of deliberate government regulation, though maybe I’m just pessimistic.