
1980s Amiga has been running the AC and heat in 19 schools for 30 years - flippyhead
https://www.geek.com/news/commodore-amiga-computer-has-been-running-the-acheat-in-19-schools-for-30-years-1625147/
======
rexarex
At McMurdo Station, Antarctica the ~2000 line phone system still runs on a NEC
PBX purchased second-hand in the 60s from a prison. A couple years ago a line
card broke and so a staff member was sent on a mission to go to a junkyard in
Nebraska and harvest all the spare parts they could out of an old one.

They’re finally moving over to VOIP, but there was something romantic about
this giant refrigerator sized behemoth, ready to break down at a moments
notice. The battery backup system for it was homemade, about 24 car batteries
in another room on a shelf, daisy chained together behind an inverted. Soon,
it’ll be replaced with two pizza box sized servers.

~~~
travbrack
I'm surprised you can find a mid century PBX in a junk yard, and that if you
could the parts wouldn't be completely destroyed by the elements. Is there
some kind of indoor tech junkyard somewhere?

~~~
perplexes
RE-PC in Seattle is like an indoor tech junkyard.

~~~
freedomben
dang it, was just up there for kubecon and would have loved to visit such a
place :-(

------
samfisher83
In the article it says the system was programmed by a highschool student 30
years ago. Now the replacement cost is 1.5-2 million.

~~~
pp19dd
So much to say about this. One is the optics of employing students three
decades ago, another is the remarkable faith they put into one at the time -
which appears to have been well founded. Today, this sort of thing would never
happen.

But overall, I get the feeling that people today are afraid of things they
can't vendor out, things they can't replace cookie-cutter style. Sometimes
that concern is justified, when you think in terms of support spanning
decades, but overall I see it as a vertical integration of bureaucracy all
around us.

It's not just this control system, it's everything. Was it Caltrans that hit a
modernization roadblock because the agency hand-built railway sensors and
circuits around that same time and now can't find replacement parts because
people don't build things in-shop anymore?

~~~
coldtea
> _So much to say about this. One is the optics of employing students three
> decades ago, another is the remarkable faith they put into one at the time -
> which appears to have been well founded. Today, this sort of thing would
> never happen._

What remarkable faith? It's a program to start/stop AC/heat units based on
temperatyre readings, not to send people to Mars.

A talented high school student can write one today, and do it with a Rasberry
Pi and for much less than $1 million (more like 5-10K).

Not as a student, but as a temp in a secondary education unit, I maintained
and updated the payroll system used to pay ~50 schools and over 1000 teachers
every month. It was a VB/MS SQL thing written by another temp a few years
earlier, but it did the job.

~~~
pp19dd
Rhetorical question: were you a licensed CPP, CPA or an actuary when you were
a temp in your secondary education unit? That's literally my point.

Yes, these things can all be done by amateurs. By tinkerers. We all here know
it. We've done it. You've done it. Simple devices with telemetry and some
logic. Simple programs that do complex things in the aggregate. Take it to
your back yard, and either one of us or a highschool student could make a
traffic light cheaper than $250,000 - $500,000 per intersection (WA state
estimate). But neither one of us could build, install and maintain a quarter
million of them, and I think you'd be hard-pressed to mobilize an army of
nerds to make it scalable.

Yeah, for all we know a PE was involved in oversight of the project. That's an
unknown that TV reporters didn't dig into and should have, because I think the
story would discover a much more relaxed time.

But if one wasn't involved, I'm saying it took faith on behalf of the
administration to assume responsibility for risk in backing this project,
whether consciously considered or not. And there are risks with electrical
projects beyond the computers, namely things catching on fire. What were the
safeguards here? What if a logic error burned out a fan? What if someone
hesitated to use the radios during a regular comm window out of habit and
there was a medical emergency?

Faith here was well-founded because obviously nothing burned down and no one
died. But who today would accept that risk without going to a licensed
professional?

~~~
coldtea
> _Rhetorical question: were you a licensed CPP, CPA or an actuary when you
> were a temp in your secondary education unit? That 's literally my point._

Well, in the real world it didn't matter at all.

The payroll sheets were then sent to the state's revenue service so that
teachers would get paid. If there was an issue, the revenue service would spot
it.

Occasionally there were a few slips, because this or that law regarding
teacher compensation, insurance contributions etc changed 2-3 times a year.
We'd just calculate the differences and issue correction invoices to
compensate. At worst a teacher would get a month's salary when they shouldn't
(e.g. they have stopped working, but the school didn't notify in time), and
then have to give it back.

> _Yes, these things can all be done by amateurs. By tinkerers. We all here
> know it. We 've done it. You've done it. Simple devices with telemetry and
> some logic. Simple programs that do complex things in the aggregate. Take it
> to your back yard, and either one of us or a highschool student could make a
> traffic light cheaper than $250,000 - $500,000 per intersection (WA state
> estimate). But neither one of us could build, install and maintain a quarter
> million of them, and I think you'd be hard-pressed to mobilize an army of
> nerds to make it scalable._

The story is not for "a quarter million" of traffic lights, though (which
would require tons of money, installations, construction work, big material
orders, etc), but about an AC/heat controller for a school district.

Such things as the latter, a "tinkerer" can often do much better, faster, and
more effectively than some "specialized" firm.

> _But if one wasn 't involved, I'm saying it took faith on behalf of the
> administration to assume responsibility for risk in backing this project,
> whether consciously considered or not. And there are risks with electrical
> projects beyond the computers, namely things catching on fire. What were the
> safeguards here? What if a logic error burned out a fan?_

The student didn't install the AC/Heat units themselves.

And the school could always have a "licensed professional" come and check the
student's program for correctness, for 1/10th or less of the cost of a 1.2
million dollar replacement, how about that?

~~~
pp19dd
BTW, I wasn't against the idea of a right-sized approach, or against your
previous work. Very much in favor of both those things. Your work obviously
did very well. So did this automation 30 years ago. My whole original remark
is about a temporal dimension, which is why I brought up the lights to anchor
them to today.

Back then, you could do things more freely with less capable and available
hardware. Different environment. Concept of computers was scratching the
surface of what they could do for us, and people didn't have a notion of
liabilities. And yes, the student didn't install the HVAC systems, but how did
tele-operated harwdware interface with it? They didn't have echo dots and
knockoff power plugs back then.

Today, you have all that available hardware but can't realistically do things
as freely. Suffice it to say that the environment has clammed up on all fronts
for an amateur to enter an industry. In some cases rightfully so (only experts
for surgeries, plumbing and wiring for me please). In others, egregiously
wrong barriers. For example, commonly the first thing that happens in a public
institution or agency is that the losing bidder files FOIA requests trying to
litigate why their solution was passed up and by whom, including copies of
correspondence between them. Imagine having to deal with that dimension.

Back to traffic lights: for something so rudimentary yet so vital, it costs
millions of dollars for a handful of intersections, and they're everywhere.
Nearly a prime candidate for a four raspberry pi solution, right? You'd think
someone would have attempted it.

~~~
coldtea
> _Today, you have all that available hardware but can 't realistically do
> things as freely. Suffice it to say that the environment has clammed up on
> all fronts for an amateur to enter an industry. In some cases rightfully so
> (only experts for surgeries, plumbing and wiring for me please). In others,
> egregiously wrong barriers._

I agree, and I think that's the key insight in all this. For some things the
extra legislation, rules etc make sense. In many other cases, they complicate
things, and can even end up delivering not just a costlier but also a less
effective outcome (e.g. the 100M government website when a 2-3M one made by a
small team would do better).

------
tom_
The comparison to a modern laptop is interesting, but a more apt comparison
would probably be to a modern desktop, which would probably be pretty easy to
keep running for more than 4-5 years.

(The Amiga does have a bunch of outdated stuff in it, but the circuit board is
quite large, with mostly standard-sized ICs, and other Amigas can typically be
cannibalized for components. The repair options for a modern laptop on the
other hand seem to be rather limited: everything's tiny, it's machine-
assembled, there's five chips on the entire board and each one has 1100 pins.
If something goes wrong, you need to replace all of it.)

~~~
jen729w
My mid-2011 MacBook Air is still going strong.

SSDs changed everything. What’s to wear out other than fan bearings?

~~~
tom_
Probably nothing - but when it _does_ go pop, you're going to open it up, and
there's the world's tiniest circuit board, with 100 tiny little capacitors,
and if you're old enough to remember the Amiga then they are all too small for
your eyes to even see. There are 3 chips, and each chip has 700 pins, and each
pin is ~0.5mm from the next. What is the difference between your laptop, model
344 revision 001, and another laptop, model 344, revision 002? - oh dear, the
answer is: _everything_. They redesigned the whole thing. Still, at least you
didn't get revision 003, which is not only entirely different again but also
coated in epoxy resin!

Meanwhile, your Amiga has this enormous motherboard that's full of DIP-size
ICs, many of them socketed, and even with your schoolboy soldering you can
extract the ones that ain't. And it almost cetainly doesn't matter if you're
hoping to get their replacements from an Amiga that's completely different,
because Commodore just didn't have the money to make N different versions of
their chips, even assuming you're trying to replace the custom ones in the
first place.

Or was it just the disk drive that fucked up, or one of the power supply
capacitors, or something like that? - well, why didn't you say! No problem.
Plenty of those about!

P.S.: but, all that said: what I was thinking about, when it comes to a modern
desktop, is that you'd just replace parts as much as possible, repairing
things as required, then when it finally dies just buy another one and restore
from your last backup. But while bench repair is more of an option with a
desktop than a laptop, in either case you probalby wouldn't actually bother,
and you'd just throw it away and buy a new one at the first sign of trouble.
So in fact, maybe it doesn't make much of a difference overall.

~~~
jen729w
For the record, my 2nd computer was an Amiga 500. Much loved.

(First was the mighty Sinclair Spectrum+. Whywhywhywhywhywhywhy did I sell
that thing.)

| “What is the difference between your laptop, model 344 revision 001, and
another laptop, model 344, revision 002?”

This is one of the things I despise about the Windows world. Say you have an
HP EliteBook 9460m. Sounds like quite a specific model number. You want the
graphics drivers. You go to HP.com, navigate Support, plug in your model
number ... and are given the option of the Intel or the NVIDIA drivers.

What the hell? Do HP not know which one they put in this machine? Was it just
a crap-shoot at the factory? That’s bonkers, in my book.

~~~
glandium
Is it really Intel _or_ Nvidia? Is it not Intel _and_ Nvidia? Many laptops
come with both and can switch between both depending on whether you need a
fast GPU or energy saving.

------
tyingq
Discussed here before in 2015:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9705830](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9705830)

~~~
lsh
and the original source of both the engadget and geek articles:
[https://www.woodtv.com/news/grand-rapids/1980s-computer-
cont...](https://www.woodtv.com/news/grand-rapids/1980s-computer-controls-
grps-heat-and-ac_20180329064517550/1086705524)

------
squarefoot
"It’ll cost about $1.5 to 2 million to replace the Amiga"

I'm doing the job for 1/4 of that money, just pay me economy class trip and a
motel.

Seriously, 1.5 to 2 million dollars? The Amiga, although it was an amazing
piece of hardware (I owned 500, 600, 2000, and 4000), was far from being
certified for any industrial use, so I wouldn't expect any extra spending in
that context. Even using the industry standard for the job (PLCs) would be
cheaper let alone using smaller single board computers (no, I'm not referring
to Arduino or Raspberry PI, there are rugged solutions well below $500) and
doing all development in house. Do I miss something or they overextimated that
spending by at least one order of magnitude?

~~~
downandout
This actually should have been the headline, not the fact that a school is
still using some old technology. My guess is that an "approved vendor" has
sold them on a ridiculously overpriced system and that 90%+ of that cost would
go straight to the vendor's bottom line. The hard part there is becoming an
approved vendor. There are companies that do nothing other than go around to
various county/state agencies and get these approvals. Then they cozy up to
every purchase decision maker at every government entity they can get to
within the jurisdictions in which they have been approved, and essentially
just drop ship drastically overpriced products to them. It's great work if you
can get it.

~~~
Declanomous
I wouldn't be surprised if the new system has some features billed as saving
tens of thousand dollars a year. That's entirely possible. My tiny little
college made winter break 2 weeks longer and saved 200k a year.

~~~
em-bee
saved on what? heating?

in austria, decades ago they invented winter holidays to save on heating for a
week. then they found out that it cost them more to reheat the building after
that week, so now they just keep the empty buildings heated.

~~~
tk75x
There's a a point at which the off-time is long enough that the cost savings
are more than the price to reheat the building. Making winter break two weeks
longer is likely to cross that threshold.

~~~
em-bee
that makes sense. damn! if only the policymakers had realized that, we could
have had more vacation.

------
dawid-s
Something I don't understand is how come can it cost so much to relace an old
Amiga to control AC? What about a regular PC with some smart software? Is this
the cost of other hardware that is so expensive?

~~~
tyingq
It reads like the current system is probably using AX.25 wireless packet radio
to communicate with the other schools. I suspect this type of use case with
amateur radio is, at best, a grey area in terms of regulatory compliance. The
replacement still shouldn't cost as much, but I'll bet it's more than just
replacing the PC. It's also coming up with some kind of cross-school network,
if one doesn't already exist. And compliance with the inevitable mountain of
government requirements.

~~~
tk75x
Another comment mentioned this already, but a single low end PLC for the
central control unit (such as
[https://www.automationdirect.com/adc/overview/catalog/progra...](https://www.automationdirect.com/adc/overview/catalog/programmable_controllers/click_series_plcs_\(stackable_micro_brick\))
) plus RDCs at each building would cost under $5000 easily, all while being in
compliance with any standards governing such equipment.

------
dingdingdang
Why not simply put the software onto a PC? All it would need is a Windows
license and a Cloanto License
([https://www.amigaforever.com/](https://www.amigaforever.com/)) to run the
emulation? WinUAE has been stable for years now and the ease with which the
system could be automated should make up for any smaller issues encountered in
terms of hardware interop.

~~~
1996
Why not leave it as is?

If it's not broken, don't fix it.

They are going to spend $2 millions breaking something that works. And that's
if they are lucky and it doesn't go over budget.

~~~
smcl
It's going to break at some point, so you can either plan for that and take a
little bit of time to analyse the current setup and design something that
could run for another 30 years ... or wait until it breaks and _then_ build a
new system

~~~
1996
Do you really think it will cost 2 million when it breaks?

It has worked 30 years so Bayes says it is likely to keep working.

~~~
smcl
Where did I say that?

I’d be very impressed and delighted to see this running in 30 years time ...
but realistically there’s vanishingly small chance the hardware would last
that long without some sort of failure. For now they’ve said they were able to
scrounge replacements for broken parts, but that cannot last

------
giarc
>The original system was programmed by a high school student in the ’80s, and
he’s the only one who knows how to fix software glitches.

This is the best part of the article. I remember a fellow student in 1995
being asked to make the website for our whole school board. He had played
around with some WYSIWYG program back then and excelled.

------
protomyth
That would be great. Try keeping a MS-DOS computer with a ‘special’ controller
board up for the same length of time. No putting the card in a newer computer
since timing is a thing. Boilers are a pain. I guess we will get rid of it
finally in a couple of years.

~~~
zozbot123
Why are you still using MS-DOG, of all things, for something that could
nowadays be easily done by an Arduino? I mean, at least the Amiga was
_designed_ with some worthwhile soft-realtime properties, due to its nature as
the first mass-marketed multimedia computer. But an IBM-compatible PC, with a
bespoke controller board? Really?

~~~
mikestew
_Why are you still using MS-DOG_

If you can’t figure that out for yourself, the good news is that there’s still
plenty to learn about this industry (and “industry” in general), and you’re
unlikely to get bored. In the meantime, something something Chesterton’s
Fence.

------
pbhjpbhj
I only skimmed the article but I didn't see anything about the local systems
that receive the commands? Or really why they need computerised control rather
than local controllers.

There must be off-the-shelf components to plugin in to replace the on-site
controllers that can be controlled remotely?

Also, what's the chance the modem just connects over POTS to another modem
with no controls on authorisation?

------
mlthoughts2018
Things like this highlight to me how insanely underpaid system engineers,
hardware engineers and software engineers are on a net present value basis.

You get paid based on some short future time window _perception_ of the value
your labor is adding. When really random people were coming to work some
random Tuesday adding a few lines of code, documenting something so that
someone else a few years later could add robustness or change a capability a
few years later, etc., and it adds up to something that gets the job done _for
30 years_.

It’s a marvel.

I’ve worked on various projects that resembled this in some ways, primarly a
defense research system for simulating aircraft properties and susceptibility
to threats, built in the 80s and 90s in C, and still being constantly used for
top level intelligence briefings in the 2000s.

To say that the engineers who made the foundational system to have a prayer of
living for 20+ years were underpaid relative to the value they created is just
a ludicrous understatement.

------
ianwalter
The most surprising part for me is that they have AC at all. (at least some)
Schools in MA don’t and I bet it gets hotter than Grand Rapids.

~~~
sbradford26
West Michigan native here. A big reason why the schools have AC is the
humidity in the summer. Since we are right next to Lake Michigan.

------
chrisseaton
Why does this need to be centralised like this? Why not a normal consumer
thermostat or manual control in each building?

~~~
protomyth
HVAC is much cheaper centralized. Things like off peak in floor heating are
just the start of optimizations that can be done. Heck, even having one
building on something else leads to pain.

~~~
chrisseaton
But if it's on something else presumably it's because the people working in
that building have decided that's the temperature they need to be comfortable.
Should trust people in the locations to be sensible.

~~~
protomyth
You overestimate the average ability of the office worker to know how the
system works. Getting the temperature comfortable for a group of people is
sometimes problematic and allowing one person to make others uncomfortable is
not a happy thing. Plus, the central controls tends to keeps things even and
extends the life of equipment. Cost is an issue and people changing
temperature everywhere sends costs up.

~~~
chrisseaton
If you don't trust people to even run a thermostat then perhaps you shouldn't
hire them to work for you!

~~~
protomyth
Oh dear Lord. Thermostats in big buildings with complicated airflows with big
open spaces are hard. People don't get how long it takes to heat or cool air.
This is not your home system. Its basically saying I can drive a SMART car
with an automatic transmission so I should be able to drive an 18 wheeler
hauling a airfoil for a wind turbine.

------
sambeau
"It’ll cost about $1.5 to 2 million to replace the Amiga"

:facepalm:

~~~
wkearney99
No, more likely that figure is for a variety of pieces that comprise the WHOLE
environmental control system. Across NINETEEN schools, not just one. Each of
which might have dozens of different HVAC zones and potentially more than one
HVAC plant.

Really, is reading comprehension that difficult?

~~~
behringer
Or they could just keep buying Amigas until they consume the entire market. 2
million is an insane amount.

~~~
kalleboo
The problem isn't just the parts availability but that the current system is
susceptible to interference from their radio intercoms.

> _The frequency used by the archaic communication system overlaps with
> maintenance works’ radios, which can sometimes cause interference with the
> system. When that happens, everyone has to turn off their walkie talkies for
> 15 or 20 minutes._

~~~
JamisonM
Right, so the $2MM replacement cost will probably pay for itself in fairly
short order just with the productivity improvements that will come from not
having issues like this anymore. Staff time is really expensive!

~~~
kalleboo
Not to mention liability in case there's some kind of emergency (fire, etc)
that they can't respond to effectively.

------
dbg31415
> The original system was programmed by a high school student in the ’80s, and
> he’s the only one who knows how to fix software glitches. Luckily, he still
> lives in the area...

> It’ll cost about $1.5 to 2 million to replace the Amiga...

Hope this "kid" is getting paid for his work.

------
snr
Wouldn't Windows 10 IoT on a raspberry pi hooked up to the internet work as an
efficient replacement instead of the $2M? AFAIK, Windows claims to handle all
the security things for you so a student developer making this project doesn't
have to.

------
londons_explore
Why exactly did the schools have to be networked together in the first place?

They don't share boilers or anything I'm guessing.

~~~
boomlinde
Given that the Amiga supposedly replaced a refrigerator sized computer,
probably to avoid buying 18 more. If it's all controlled by radio anyway,
what's the point in decentralizing?

------
sys_64738
Couldn't they replace it with a laptop running UAE?

------
scrame
"1200-bit modem". Good job, geek.com, I'm sure the rest of your breathless
reporting is just as accurate.

~~~
JdeBP
That is a direct quotation of the person cited, note.

------
mtts
"The original system was programmed by a high school student in the ’80s, and
he’s the only one who knows how to fix software glitches. "

Wow ... That is beyond irresponsible ...

~~~
EliRivers
Pretty standard, I think. I know of lots of software running business critical
functions that are unmaintainable for want of lost knowledge.

~~~
msh
Maybe, but still irresponsible.

~~~
rbanffy
The more you know about embedded and IoT, the worse you'll sleep.

Do you want to be right, or do you prefer to be happy?

~~~
vardump
Truer words than that are seldom uttered.

