Linus Torvalds sees “zero real reason for anybody to waste one second” on them.

I didn’t know whether to mark this NSFW or not but it’s time to buy a new computer if you haven’t upgraded in multiple decades.

  • moody@lemmings.world
    0·
    1 day ago

    I’m kind of shocked that it’s only been 18 years since the last 486 chip was made. It was launched in 1989 and discontinued in 2008, while the original Pentium was launched in 1993 and discontinued in 1999. Hell, the Pentium 4 was discontinued in 2007.

      • xohshoo@lemmy.world
        0·
        5 hours ago

        Time is weird. A few years ago, I would have agreed. Now I feel that everything from March 2020 to now was just yesterday, and everything before covid is ancient history

    • Vopyr@lemmy.world
      0·
      1 day ago

      It’s quite incredible, and very interesting. I wonder why they continued to produce these CPUs.

        • mriswith@lemmy.worldEnglish
          0·
          22 hours ago

          Yeah, the amount of industrial machinery being controlled by ancient hardware would baffle a lot of people.

          For a comparison people might relate to: There are ATMs running twenty year old versions of Windows XP.

        • catloaf@lemm.eeEnglish
          0·
          1 day ago

          Yup. Airplanes, for example, take a lot of validation. It’s extremely expensive to retest a new configuration, so they make one computer, get it validated, and use it unmodified for the next thirty years.

          This is why the Boeing Max 8 thing was a big deal. They made approved modifications, but found in rare conditions it could cause unexpected and dangerous flight conditions. But, a times b times c was estimated to be less than the cost of doing it properly, so they didn’t.

          • dan@upvote.au
            0·
            1 day ago

            Same with industrial automation. There’s some robotic arms, assembly lines, etc in use today that still use PCs with ISA slots - the predecessor to PCI, which was the predecessor to PCIe. Old 16-bit bus that could only transfer a max of around 5Mbps. That’s why you’ll occasionally see newish “industrial” motherboards that have ISA slots and parallel ports.

            A project I worked on at university (way back in 2010) was for one of the largest providers of air traffic control systems. Our project was interesting - usage of eye tracking and screen recording via VNC for training of air traffic controllers - but it was even more interesting to learn about some of their processes.

            Whenever they built an ATC system for a client, they’d build one or two spares at the same time, with exactly identical hardware. They did this for two reasons:

            1. If the hardware breaks down, they can supply a new system that exactly matches the hardware that was verified.
            2. If a client has an issue with their system, they can try and replicate the issue on a clone of that client’s system.

            We got to see a storage room with a large number of these systems. Lots of different PCs anywhere from a month to maybe 15 years old. :)

          • LandedGentry@lemmy.zipEnglish
            0·
            1 day ago

            Dude when those emails came out and we saw the engineer talking about how he wouldn’t let his own family fly on one to another engineer when asked…truly slackjawed moment.

              • LandedGentry@lemmy.zipEnglish
                0·
                18 hours ago

                It’s real bad

                “This airplane is designed by clowns who in turn are supervised by monkeys.”

                “I still haven’t been forgiven by God for the covering up I did last year,” one employee says in 2018, referring to an exchange of information with the FAA.

                “Would you put your family on a Max simulator trained aircraft? I wouldn’t,” says one employee to another, who responds, “No.”