

Apparently, employers are still asking for Windows 95 and Windows 3.1 skills  - talbina
http://www.indeed.com/jobs?q=%22Windows+95%22&l=

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mediaman
Many of the postings for 95 and 3.1 appear to be in the field of health care.

Perhaps this is an important message to companies attempting to create rapid
innovation in the health sector...

~~~
_delirium
If it's anything like the way specialist science-lab IT works, I can
definitely see that. There's plenty of chemistry labs with ancient OSs on some
machines because they have some piece of equipment that doesn't have drivers
for anything newer. Basically a disconnect between lifecycles: a good piece of
chemistry equipment is supposed to last 20+ years, especially if it's doing
something relatively routine and well-understood, whereas software seems not
to usually be intended to stick around for 20 years.

~~~
silentbicycle
> Basically a disconnect between lifecycles: a good piece of chemistry
> equipment is supposed to last 20+ years, especially if it's doing something
> relatively routine and well-understood, whereas software seems not to
> usually be intended to stick around for 20 years.

This is a good observation, and would probably make a great topic for a much
larger discussion/essay.

~~~
mikecarlucci
Consistency is huge. It's amazing what some of those guys will get out of
their equipment. I spent some time talking with a guy who builds data
acquisition equipment. Most of his customers started using his sensors in the
80s and until the system either breaks beyond repair or the entire team of
scientists has retired, they want to keep the exact same setup. Amazing
dedication, but the benefits of testing with the same equipment over many
years can lead to some great observations over the long term.

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talbina
And Windows 3.1 also:
[http://www.indeed.com/jobs?q=%22Windows+3.1%22&l=](http://www.indeed.com/jobs?q=%22Windows+3.1%22&l=)

They may have been copying and pasting the same posting for years.

And these are the ones who glance over resumes to see who is qualified. That's
very disturbing and discouraging.

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csomar
Last year I worked for a company that runs a huge (hundred of thousands of
lines) Ms Access 97 software.

The migration to Access 2003 needs lot of changes and (worse) they don't have
a version control tool, schema of the application, any documentation... The
code is a mess and written by bad programmers.

So what to do? Start programming for Office 2007 from scratch? This decision
took them around 2 years after failing to integrate their access tables with
Microsoft SQL (The speed is insanely slow for large corporations).

~~~
chime
I need to find companies/projects like these. I would have loved to solve this
problem in one way or another.

a) Rewrite as a web-app in platform of choice.

b) Put the entire DB in RAM on a really fast Windows server using SuperVolume.
I'm guessing the MDB is less than 16GB in size. Setup Citrix/XenApp on it and
deploy MS Access 97 as a standalone Xen application. Users only need to log on
to <http://citrix.company.com> and click the "Access 97" icon. It will launch
Access as a local app but it actually runs on the server. You get local disk
speeds on the DB with minimal network usage. XenApp licenses are very cheap
compared to even new Office licenses, let alone a full rewrite. If users do
not need to change the Access 97 code/queries, you can deploy Access runtime
instead of the full-access.

c) I'm guessing they already tried to move the tables to MS SQL while just
linking it from Access 97. If that isn't possible because the code uses tons
of Access specific queries, mirror every table to MS SQL periodically,
depending on the frequency of updates. Convert the slowest read-only reports
to use the data from SQL while data-entry continues to use Access 97 tables.

d) Break up the single Access DB into multiple DBs if possible. If Finance and
Warehouse modules share almost nothing in common, they don't need to be on the
same DB. If the 'employee' table is used to authenticate logins, put that
table on MS SQL and link it from both Finance.mdb and Warehouse.mdb.

e) Implement a decent ERP system if this application is really core to the
company's operation. MS Dynamics NAV would probably be their best bet.

~~~
csomar
Thanks for your insightful comment. Here are my comments on your points.

a) They have currently started doing it.

b) Companies don't need it. They aren't really bothered with Access 97 and
Windows 2000 or XP. All they need is our application. Low OS/Application means
low and cheap hardware.

c) Tried the simple linking in MS Access, no improvement in speed. We need to
re-write all the queries from scratch. Many problems showed and since the code
base is huge, rewriting from scratch seemed more feasible and easier.

d) The application is huge, it has dozen of DBs

e) I don't know what you are talking about, but will do a little research.

~~~
chime
Those were just five different ways you could have gone. (a) is what I would
have suggested too. I'm going to guess the main reason for the speed issues is
bad queries (m*n joins, no/few indexes etc). The best solution is often a
rewrite in these cases.

What I meant by (b) was to put the entire database in RAM and let users access
it by logging on to the server directly. You can put the MDB files on a file-
server network share (like P:\Database\Company.mdb) and 10 people can use it
at the same time as long as they all have Access 97 on their local machines
and have read/write access to the P:\Database folder. Instead of doing it this
way, try this for super speed: setup a fast Windows server with tons of RAM,
create/format a 2GB-16GB partition as drive D:, install SuperVolume to load
that entire drive D: to RAM. Move the MDB files here.

Don't make users open the MDB files from their PCs directly. Let them log on
to a Windows Server as Terminal Server (TS) users and access it from the D:
drive. If you have some money, install Citrix so logging on to the TS could be
done by just visiting a website and logging in. This would let people from all
over the world use the Access MDB at exactly the same speed as anyone
physically logged into the server. With Citrix, you'll only need 20-32kb of
bandwidth for most users.

~~~
csomar
Users working over the same database crash it. It seems that when users send
requests in the same time, the DB crash (it can be fixed, but that's
annoying). It doesn't always happen, but when you have more than 10 users,
this increases the odds.

So the short term solution was Terminal Server. It worked great and speed was
fine, until in some days something happened in the Windows Server that slowed
it down (some kind of caching or somewhat), so the illiterate technician just
said that Windows Server is bad.

We are now (Ok, I left) reckoning on an advanced/new Web or Desktop platform.
They are aiming to finish a part in the software this year. Will see what they
do ;)

------
NathanKP
Windows 95 is still used extensively in embedded programming due to the
unparalleled direct hardware access that it provides. When you are developing
code for devices that use 8086, or even older FPGA's, you don't need the
latest OS. In fact, the newer versions of Windows have more security and
device layers which block the operation of the older programs used for
uploading code to those older microprocessors.

As a result, some of the old chipsets can only be programmed using old
software which only works on 95. For a business that does embedded programming
it isn't feasible to switch to a new chipset that would require a complete
code rewrite just so that they can use a newer OS.

Interestingly embedded programming is also an extremely high paying job
because there aren't that many people who can do it.

~~~
heyjonboy
Why wouldn't you just use Linux for embedded systems? Seems wasteful to use a
GUI-based OS for something that will most likely be a single-purpose device.

~~~
mahmud
Toolchain and development cycle. Windows 95 systems programming is trivial,
and not in a good way. You can access privileged system registers and memory
areas directly, until you crash your box. Once you learn how to write a VxD
it's a matter of tweaking it for other purposes, since the great difficulty
lies in just getting the skeleton to work.

~~~
nitrogen
Linux is mostly that easy, in my experience. It may be easier, since there are
probably already drivers for most of your chips. At any rate, once you have a
skeleton kernel mode driver, it's just a matter of tweaking it for other
purposes.

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silentbicycle
How many point-of-sale systems have you seen that run on Windows 3.1 or old
curses-ish UIs? I'm sure it's even more common out of public view: in airport
ticket kiosks, warehouse inventory systems, and the like. I saw my share of
anachronistic systems working for a Midwestern public library system.

Legacy code hell doesn't just apply to codebases.

~~~
mahmud
LOL @curses; those are Borland BGI and Turbo Graphics, man. To run curses at
that time, you needed a 25k Sun Workstation.

~~~
nitrogen
Some of them probably were curses-based, running on a central server feeding a
dozen Wyse terminals around the building.

------
stretchwithme
I was already to laugh about this when I saw the first ad was for a job in my
home town!

Actually, it wouldn't surprise me if there are jobs out there that require
knowledge of DOS. It seems nothing ever truly dies.

~~~
hernan7
Was it Joel that said "obsolete hardware goes in the trash heap; obsolete
software goes into production tomorrow"? I can't find the quote right now...

~~~
stretchwithme
ha ha. good one

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miles
Hey, don't be hatin' on Win9x - it's allegedly got greater market share than
the iPad or Blackberry:

[http://www.netmarketshare.com/operating-system-market-
share....](http://www.netmarketshare.com/operating-system-market-
share.aspx?qprid=10)

~~~
talbina
Does the internet even "work" with Windows 95/98?

~~~
mahmud
Did you not exist 10 years ago? Sheesh. I still get Windows 98 hits in my
server logs, mostly zombie boxes running bots.

~~~
talbina
Is there a need for your first sentence, the praiseworthy one?

I was asking if most of the sites would work with browsers in that day...and I
didn't know Opera and Firefox still support them.

~~~
mahmud
I apologize for being a dick. Your question was about the internet, which
_did_ work with Windows 95, and so did the web, in fact, the whole dotcom era
was powered by Windows 95 more than any other OS.

Windows 95 had a native implementation of sockets, Winsock2, it also had
telnet, and a serial communication utility. I ran Opera, IE and Netscape
Navigator Gold on it. Eudora for Email, and Agent for a newsreader. Windows 98
shipped with Internet Explorer and had Active Desktop, the precursor to all
the gadgets that you see today. The Windows SDK included even more controls,
including MS HTML control that allowed you to embed web views (i.e. html
frames) inside your apps. All MS help was converted HTML format as well, and
the help compiler could convert HTML documents to CHM. It was, only, 10 years
ago :-)

I still use the email account I opened using Windows 95 :-)

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TrevorBurnham
OK, the support ones make some sense, but I'm baffled by the one that wants
experience with Matlab and Windows 95. Who uses Matlab under Windows 95 today?
A scientific organization that hasn't been able to buy new hardware for more
than a decade?

~~~
ramchip
Assuming it's on the same machine: perhaps they have an instrument which runs
on Windows 95 and they do some light data processing, or use Matlab to make it
interoperate with another device?

We've had a similar need in my lab, although it was Windows 2000. We buy new
machines alright, but some instruments can't be easily upgraded due to the
computer being integrated with it, the drivers being proprietary and specific
to the OS, etc.

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paulhart
I believe some hotel interactive systems (i.e. through the TV) use Windows 95
or 98.

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loupgarou21
I have a client still running an old NT box because it's the newest computer
that can run a $100k+ piece of equipment. The piece of equipment it is
attached to is in excellent shape and is still considered state of the art.

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duck
This shows the great disconnect between IT and HR at most companies.

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thepsi
Apparently, everyone's copying Google's layout.

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gnubardt
i'd rather work at taco bell

~~~
talbina
Or Subway, unless you want to live on the toilet.

