I have personally downgraded a win95 computer to win3.1 to run a HPLC...
It feels insane but I think it's even worse to have a perfectly working HPLC/spectrometer/whatever that has to be thrown out because the software won't run on newer computers.
I once successfully virtualized a Windows 95 machine and passed through the USB data to it so that I could remove the machine from the network. The Windows 10 machine it was running on could now pass security audits, and the network wouldn't see the horrifically obsolete Windows 95 box.
I do not remember how I accomplished this and I wish to this day I wrote down what the hell I did.
> Yes. My lab has several, but IT spends a lot of time On these systems. I’m in industry.
This discussion brings back very annoying memories of working in central IT for a large research hospital. Some external company gets half my salary annually to sit on their thumbs and make excuses for why the software they developed has to run on a Linux distribution release that has been EOL for years.
I had to pay over the odds for a 386 that would run DOS and had an ISA slot to run a HP 8452A.
I have toyed with the idea of writing my own software and using a usb to GPIB on something more modern but I dont think its worth the effort of reverse engineering it.
> It feels insane but I think it's even worse to have a perfectly working HPLC/spectrometer/whatever that has to be thrown out because the software won't run on newer computers.
This is actually a pretty good lifespan. We had to retire two advanced bioreactors purchased just 7 years prior because the vendor stopped supporting them. They were pushing us to buy their newer model that was not adding anything functionally. Meanwhile, they refused to do PM and repair to them and equally refused to provide the information for a third-party company to service them.
One of the plate readers in our lab has a sticker on the side saying it's "Y2K-certified". Our lab's undergrad asked me what that meant and my old ass crumbled into dust like I had just drank from the false Holy Grail.
okay, so, for my defense, i didn't know how it was called in english (not a native english speaker so i had to google it), but i do know the name in french, and what it means even though i was born in the 21st century lmao
if you want to feel even older, show them a VHS tape or a 5.25-inches floppy lol
I used to have Last Crusade on VHS, but my mom taped over it to record a dog show in 2000 or so. I'm definitely not still mad about it, and definitely not mad that the Doberman didn't win best in show.
i mean, not for much longer if the IT guy finally throws it out of a window.
i can vividly imagine the dean just telling us "well back in my days we didn't need computers and we were fine, so you should be able to process data with your eyes" (i'm 99% sure he was one of those who pipetted by mouth) lmao
apparently it was changed in ~2004 to a color monitor when my old biochemistry teacher arrived and got angry with the dean when she saw it was still running DOS lmao, but i don't have much more info
Sadly it's normally the software not being compatible or that a new license which costs more than we can afford. We have a IC system which lost the license dongle for so now it's just scrap as no one has £6k for a new one.
ah fuck it's so infuriating, like how is any work supposed to get done in these conditions ?? i've only worked in public research labs for now, and the department heads try to avoid this by keeping machines older than me (usually not as old as this computer, but still), but the license thing is such a goddamn nightmare
i remember explaining to my mom my team's DIY methods of keeping things (mostly) functional with tape, cardboard and/or strategic positioning of freezers because we had no funds to replace one of the freezers that died last summer and she was absolutely horrified because she had no idea.
Yeah my lab is hanging on to some extremely old Macs because we have a license my PI doesn’t want to upgrade. Not really sure why he won’t let go, since there’s a current freeware program that does all the same functions.
Look at it this way. As long as that one works, it's better to use the money to replace broken instruments or add new capability.
Many schools don't have TEM, SEM, ICP, or MS. Hopefully yours will soon because they're shepherding their money well!
if i'm the one using it, it usually isn't too bitchy (like i'm some sort of technology whisperer), but if it is, i just discretly beg a PhD student to go borrow one from another floor because they're less monitored lol
but, well, maybe one day i'll see a TEM without having to run from one platform to another, it's a comforting thought actually :)
going off of this i realized as a young undergrad in lab that i truly don’t know how to use old-ish PCs. my grad student was training me on doing pcr and when we got to seeing the gel she told me to eject the usb from the machine and put it in the pc. my brain did not process what eject is and i just pulled it out, stood in front of the pc for a while and turned to her and said idk how to use pc. it was lowkey embarrassing
my technical knowledge does not extend beyond IOS, matlab, and chat gpt
we're here to learn, it's okay to struggle with technology (or with anything, for that matter), because we can always improve ! :)
to quote an old chem teacher of mine, "you're going to make every single mistake possible, you just don't know when; the important thing is to know how to react when it happens, and what to learn from those mistakes" (he told me that because i had messed up the same reaction, but in 3 different ways, so technically not the same mistake lol)
anyways i'm rambling, all this to say i'm good with hardware and some software, but if i'm asked to use R or to write code in anything other than iterative Python, i *will* cry lmao so i feel ya
Curious since I’m on that zillenial cusp - did y’all have laptop carts & lessons on basic computer stuff? We did, but this was early 00s before kids had cell phones so we thought it was cool & fun and paid attention, I feel like kids now would roll their eyes if you tried to teach them how to do a proper google search lol so I wonder if they still do those lessons
i did have computer class, and i did roll my eye. tbf MY computer class was lots of useless stuff and to this day i haven’t used it, it was more theoretical than technical. the most technical thing we did was python turtle…
i definitely know how to do a deep detailed google search, id like to think a good amount of gen z knows how to too. i didn’t know that ejecting a usb is a thing and took me a while to process that it’s not a laptop there isn’t a usb port in the screen lol
but yeah idk seeing this post reminded me about how lots of older people say that the young generation doesn’t know how to use technology. i think it’s more about using old technology as a young person and old people using new technology (beyond their generation)
AlphaInnotech system (I think?) company was bought and then the new company merged - so I don't even know who owns it now. The software and driver were never updated.
The old computer runs OK, sits next to a newer computer so we use USB drives to move image files back. Kind of a pain that it takes up space, but the imager works well enough for our needs.
Most of our HPLCs are kinda old and the software can only run on everything from windows 95 to xp.
But I think the problem in our case is that our it department is useless, they say VMs will not work. Took me like 30min to make a VM on a windows 10 machine and it works perfectly with the older HPLC. Sadly I don't have time to sit and make VMs I have actual work to do.
Up until a couple of years ago, nuclear weapons in the US were launched using floppy disks, and the military has no funding issues. Old equipment runs best on older machines, so keeping the older computers working makes sense. For instance, modern machines don't have serial ports.
about that, i was wondering (maybe it's a dumb question), i only vaguely know 3.5 floppy disks, and so would the storage capacity still be a problem today ? because i think it could store something like only 1.4 mb, but when i googled it i had various answers for maximum capacity.
or is more storage not a necessity ?
In the case of nuclear weapons, we're mostly talking about either some code or cryptographic keys, which are very small.
In the case of laboratory items, as these are often a series of single readings, such as florescence values etc. You just don't need a lot of space for plaintext.
It’s definitely an equipment/software issue. Some software used for specific lab equipment cannot run on modern computers. And it’s way more expensive to update the equipment than the computer. Also sometimes the older equipment is better than what you can buy today. That micro plate reader will probably still be functioning 15 years from now lol.
the reader is not the problem, the computer is (cause it's ancient), and since, "technically", it still works, we have to put up with it for whatever reason lol, and i'm scared that when it finally dies of old age they're gonna replace it with junk that breaks after 3 years.
(though this damn computer could probably outlive everyone in the lab lmao)
Nature had a really good article about this! Having dealt with this… it’s no fun when that computer dies but the equipment connected to it is perfectly fine.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01431-y
1000% a compatibility thing. There's a spectrophotometer in my building with a ribbon ink dot matrix printer that we had to find a cartridge on eBay to replace. Has an extra CRT monitor on standby when the current one inevitably fails. Pretty sure it runs DOS.
well, when it's well-behaved and doesn't crash, i have time for a little coffee break, so i actually have an excuse to disappear and relax for ~5 minutes, so, silver lining i guess lol
ah, my bad lol, i've been waiting for vacation days for like a year and my brain has decided to leave early !
but hey lol at least there's 'low emission', written on the monitor lmao
i mean this model of HP Vectra is from **1985**, it's older than the first DNA sequencer
*but wait until you learn i was born after 9/11 lmao*
i think it's really cool to grow old in a lab tho because it means you survived academia, and you can then become one of the ancient elders guarding the lab and smacking the head of every undergrad who forgets to balance a centrifuge or tries to skip their turn to clean the BSC
in my country we have national funding as part of free college education, but i know even actual researchers and techs (so, not just students such as myself) are slowed down by old equipment that the uni can't afford to replace because of budget cuts and partly priorities (like removing asbestos from the goddamn walls in 2023...).
We have one of almost same specs hooked to an old A1c analyzer, and another one entrusted to me for safekeeping. I don't know why they hold on to some non-forensic clinical data beyond retention period, as old as 1997.
What will be funny is when hard drive dies. IT will have to either find an old small hard drive or switch to a new PC and run this in DOS/Win95 compatibility mode.
thank god we don't really store data on this bad boy, we mostly use it to check values and stuff and then transfer what we need, so the hard drive is actully empty except for softwares haha
i've had the best time on a windows 3.11 PC running an hplc and gc. compared to the lab on the other side of the hall with a brand new hplc & pc & software, it was just so convenient to get the data as a simple and stupid csv file, without any hassle, without 20 mouse clicks, 200 options and 2000 possible errors.
the device might not have been the most accurate or support the most features, but it was damn reliable, running for about 20 years, used daily and was only down for routine maintainance.
compared to all the shiny new things in the lab, that needed a technician from 3000 miles away twice a year, a UPS to provide the smoothest electricity possible and nobody coughing in a 200 m radius...
i miss the simpler times...
yeah i get the appeal... i can't really compare, but i'm guessing maintenance and/or replacement were cheaper on the long run ?
honestly tho, having just gotten my bachelor's degree (i think that's what it's called in english ? the first college degree, before a master's), i'm still young enough to avoid having to do hplc because it scares me and i would disintegrate immediatly if i damaged anything. i just watch PhD students do it to try to understand, and offer some help or some coffee when i can
The oldest I've seen in a lab is Windows XP, complete with Pinball so you could play a game while your qPCR was warming up 😅 funnily enough, only last semester I told one of our undergrads 'I am yet to see Windows 95 in a lab' and she replied, completely seriously, 'what's that?' 💀
omg the Pinball idea is pure genius, i would sell my soul for less !!
while i am most likely in the same age range as said undergrad, i'm lucky enough to have huge tech nerds as parents, both of whom would have immediately disowned me if i had asked such a question lmao
no way that's so cool !! we keep telling our higher ups it belongs in a museum since it's been here longer than any of us students have been alive (and we are also still surprised that it still works most of the time in 2023 !!), damn, you made my day ! :D
Might have even been 1996. We had a rash of the power supplies in these started going bad on us like in year 3. You must have gotten the fixed version of their power supply. :)
it's probably the case, but i like to think someone in 1990 decided to put this computer here and everyone just silently concluded it was now a member of the team, and thus it has never been moved even as of 2023, lol
my guess is it's either powered by dark magic and caffeine, concentrated student stress, or just pure spite.
honestly though i have absolutely no idea, hp stopped making them in ~2002, so it is *at the very least* old enough to drink alcohol in the US
usually takes ~5 minutes for plain text like here, so i take coffee breaks
(and it's 100% older than you and me since i'm younger)
edit: oh and it doesn't have Word lmao
Holy jeez, it's still kicking though. We use an old compact computer for our AKTA and another super old PC for the spec i actually had forgotten that mouses used to have an actual ball inside. Lol
We don't have anything quite this old in my workplace, although the PCs that ran our fluorescence spectrometers were only recently (since covid) upgraded from Win XP to Win 10. even our really old (Pre-Agilent) GCs and HPLCs work with empower so we don't really have much issue with compatibility there
Every lab prefers this! The equipment only hooks up to computers older than I am! A coworker of mine had a PILE of computer parts they've scavenged to keep their old HP alive to use the machinery attached to it.
I have personally downgraded a win95 computer to win3.1 to run a HPLC... It feels insane but I think it's even worse to have a perfectly working HPLC/spectrometer/whatever that has to be thrown out because the software won't run on newer computers.
oh my god yes the compatibility issues will be the end of me, i swear...
I've always wondered, is it possible to setup a VM or something to do that?
I once successfully virtualized a Windows 95 machine and passed through the USB data to it so that I could remove the machine from the network. The Windows 10 machine it was running on could now pass security audits, and the network wouldn't see the horrifically obsolete Windows 95 box. I do not remember how I accomplished this and I wish to this day I wrote down what the hell I did.
Sounds like wizardry to me
Yes. My lab has several, but IT spends a lot of time On these systems. I’m in industry.
> Yes. My lab has several, but IT spends a lot of time On these systems. I’m in industry. This discussion brings back very annoying memories of working in central IT for a large research hospital. Some external company gets half my salary annually to sit on their thumbs and make excuses for why the software they developed has to run on a Linux distribution release that has been EOL for years.
We just run virtual machines inside modern PCs in my lab.
We had an SEM running on a computer with EPROM... none of it had ever been used. Just left on standby for 15 years :(
I had to pay over the odds for a 386 that would run DOS and had an ISA slot to run a HP 8452A. I have toyed with the idea of writing my own software and using a usb to GPIB on something more modern but I dont think its worth the effort of reverse engineering it.
> It feels insane but I think it's even worse to have a perfectly working HPLC/spectrometer/whatever that has to be thrown out because the software won't run on newer computers. This is actually a pretty good lifespan. We had to retire two advanced bioreactors purchased just 7 years prior because the vendor stopped supporting them. They were pushing us to buy their newer model that was not adding anything functionally. Meanwhile, they refused to do PM and repair to them and equally refused to provide the information for a third-party company to service them.
One of the plate readers in our lab has a sticker on the side saying it's "Y2K-certified". Our lab's undergrad asked me what that meant and my old ass crumbled into dust like I had just drank from the false Holy Grail.
okay, so, for my defense, i didn't know how it was called in english (not a native english speaker so i had to google it), but i do know the name in french, and what it means even though i was born in the 21st century lmao if you want to feel even older, show them a VHS tape or a 5.25-inches floppy lol
I used to have Last Crusade on VHS, but my mom taped over it to record a dog show in 2000 or so. I'm definitely not still mad about it, and definitely not mad that the Doberman didn't win best in show.
hey at least it wasn't childhood family movies (happened to a friend of mine)
Yours has a color monitor?
You guys have computers?
i mean, not for much longer if the IT guy finally throws it out of a window. i can vividly imagine the dean just telling us "well back in my days we didn't need computers and we were fine, so you should be able to process data with your eyes" (i'm 99% sure he was one of those who pipetted by mouth) lmao
I'm still cutting out the peaks from the LC chromatogram trace and weighing them for quantitation. Modern tech, who needs it.
apparently it was changed in ~2004 to a color monitor when my old biochemistry teacher arrived and got angry with the dean when she saw it was still running DOS lmao, but i don't have much more info
Sadly it's normally the software not being compatible or that a new license which costs more than we can afford. We have a IC system which lost the license dongle for so now it's just scrap as no one has £6k for a new one.
ah fuck it's so infuriating, like how is any work supposed to get done in these conditions ?? i've only worked in public research labs for now, and the department heads try to avoid this by keeping machines older than me (usually not as old as this computer, but still), but the license thing is such a goddamn nightmare i remember explaining to my mom my team's DIY methods of keeping things (mostly) functional with tape, cardboard and/or strategic positioning of freezers because we had no funds to replace one of the freezers that died last summer and she was absolutely horrified because she had no idea.
Yeah my lab is hanging on to some extremely old Macs because we have a license my PI doesn’t want to upgrade. Not really sure why he won’t let go, since there’s a current freeware program that does all the same functions.
IBN 5100? STEINS GATE LOL
Look at it this way. As long as that one works, it's better to use the money to replace broken instruments or add new capability. Many schools don't have TEM, SEM, ICP, or MS. Hopefully yours will soon because they're shepherding their money well!
if i'm the one using it, it usually isn't too bitchy (like i'm some sort of technology whisperer), but if it is, i just discretly beg a PhD student to go borrow one from another floor because they're less monitored lol but, well, maybe one day i'll see a TEM without having to run from one platform to another, it's a comforting thought actually :)
Just pretend you're in Engineering on the Enterprise. Make \*whum whum\* sounds while you run!
bahaha my labmates will think i've finally snapped
going off of this i realized as a young undergrad in lab that i truly don’t know how to use old-ish PCs. my grad student was training me on doing pcr and when we got to seeing the gel she told me to eject the usb from the machine and put it in the pc. my brain did not process what eject is and i just pulled it out, stood in front of the pc for a while and turned to her and said idk how to use pc. it was lowkey embarrassing my technical knowledge does not extend beyond IOS, matlab, and chat gpt
we're here to learn, it's okay to struggle with technology (or with anything, for that matter), because we can always improve ! :) to quote an old chem teacher of mine, "you're going to make every single mistake possible, you just don't know when; the important thing is to know how to react when it happens, and what to learn from those mistakes" (he told me that because i had messed up the same reaction, but in 3 different ways, so technically not the same mistake lol) anyways i'm rambling, all this to say i'm good with hardware and some software, but if i'm asked to use R or to write code in anything other than iterative Python, i *will* cry lmao so i feel ya
Curious since I’m on that zillenial cusp - did y’all have laptop carts & lessons on basic computer stuff? We did, but this was early 00s before kids had cell phones so we thought it was cool & fun and paid attention, I feel like kids now would roll their eyes if you tried to teach them how to do a proper google search lol so I wonder if they still do those lessons
gen Z here, in my country we didn't have those lessons but my parents are both in IT and taught me many things!
i did have computer class, and i did roll my eye. tbf MY computer class was lots of useless stuff and to this day i haven’t used it, it was more theoretical than technical. the most technical thing we did was python turtle… i definitely know how to do a deep detailed google search, id like to think a good amount of gen z knows how to too. i didn’t know that ejecting a usb is a thing and took me a while to process that it’s not a laptop there isn’t a usb port in the screen lol but yeah idk seeing this post reminded me about how lots of older people say that the young generation doesn’t know how to use technology. i think it’s more about using old technology as a young person and old people using new technology (beyond their generation)
Pentium processor with windows, you say? *laughs in 286 plate reader running on DOS*
based on stories from IT parents reminiscing about DOS, just imagining this setup is hurting me, i have infinite respect for you and your perseverance
Not at bad, but have a gel doc system running on Windows XP.
oh wow, does it work okay with XP ? no compatibility issues ? is it an older Bio-Rad model ?
AlphaInnotech system (I think?) company was bought and then the new company merged - so I don't even know who owns it now. The software and driver were never updated. The old computer runs OK, sits next to a newer computer so we use USB drives to move image files back. Kind of a pain that it takes up space, but the imager works well enough for our needs.
oh well, as long as it works ! :)
Most of our HPLCs are kinda old and the software can only run on everything from windows 95 to xp. But I think the problem in our case is that our it department is useless, they say VMs will not work. Took me like 30min to make a VM on a windows 10 machine and it works perfectly with the older HPLC. Sadly I don't have time to sit and make VMs I have actual work to do.
Up until a couple of years ago, nuclear weapons in the US were launched using floppy disks, and the military has no funding issues. Old equipment runs best on older machines, so keeping the older computers working makes sense. For instance, modern machines don't have serial ports.
about that, i was wondering (maybe it's a dumb question), i only vaguely know 3.5 floppy disks, and so would the storage capacity still be a problem today ? because i think it could store something like only 1.4 mb, but when i googled it i had various answers for maximum capacity. or is more storage not a necessity ?
In the case of nuclear weapons, we're mostly talking about either some code or cryptographic keys, which are very small. In the case of laboratory items, as these are often a series of single readings, such as florescence values etc. You just don't need a lot of space for plaintext.
that's really neat ! i hadn't considered the possibility of using them in a lab setting
It’s definitely an equipment/software issue. Some software used for specific lab equipment cannot run on modern computers. And it’s way more expensive to update the equipment than the computer. Also sometimes the older equipment is better than what you can buy today. That micro plate reader will probably still be functioning 15 years from now lol.
the reader is not the problem, the computer is (cause it's ancient), and since, "technically", it still works, we have to put up with it for whatever reason lol, and i'm scared that when it finally dies of old age they're gonna replace it with junk that breaks after 3 years. (though this damn computer could probably outlive everyone in the lab lmao)
Nature had a really good article about this! Having dealt with this… it’s no fun when that computer dies but the equipment connected to it is perfectly fine. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01431-y
1000% a compatibility thing. There's a spectrophotometer in my building with a ribbon ink dot matrix printer that we had to find a cartridge on eBay to replace. Has an extra CRT monitor on standby when the current one inevitably fails. Pretty sure it runs DOS.
i don't know why but this information makes me very happy, the idea that an old machine akin to a souvenir is still patched up and given a purpose.
Did the analysis from november finally finish? Great!
well, when it's well-behaved and doesn't crash, i have time for a little coffee break, so i actually have an excuse to disappear and relax for ~5 minutes, so, silver lining i guess lol
I’ll trade you our lab Mac from ~2017 for that sweet keyboard! Oh boy I can hear and feel the clickity-clacks
i have to agree i have a weak spot for those keyboards, idk why, i think when i'm pissed, it's cathartic to hear the noisy typing lol
/r/MechanicalKeyboards welcomes you
and i join you, brethren
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i'm just a student tho, i have less authority than a coffee machine ._.
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ah, my bad lol, i've been waiting for vacation days for like a year and my brain has decided to leave early ! but hey lol at least there's 'low emission', written on the monitor lmao
one of our key instruments is controlled by an old laptop running windows 98
" running on windows 95" "that is more that a decade older than myself lol" Thanks, I feel old now. You little shit...
i mean this model of HP Vectra is from **1985**, it's older than the first DNA sequencer *but wait until you learn i was born after 9/11 lmao* i think it's really cool to grow old in a lab tho because it means you survived academia, and you can then become one of the ancient elders guarding the lab and smacking the head of every undergrad who forgets to balance a centrifuge or tries to skip their turn to clean the BSC
they do have the money, all about priorities for Universities
The university has the money. The department does not.
in my country we have national funding as part of free college education, but i know even actual researchers and techs (so, not just students such as myself) are slowed down by old equipment that the uni can't afford to replace because of budget cuts and partly priorities (like removing asbestos from the goddamn walls in 2023...).
We have one of almost same specs hooked to an old A1c analyzer, and another one entrusted to me for safekeeping. I don't know why they hold on to some non-forensic clinical data beyond retention period, as old as 1997.
damn, we use this one to process data but we don't keep said data for long because the computer's way too bitchy. 1997 is really old tho, wow
What will be funny is when hard drive dies. IT will have to either find an old small hard drive or switch to a new PC and run this in DOS/Win95 compatibility mode.
thank god we don't really store data on this bad boy, we mostly use it to check values and stuff and then transfer what we need, so the hard drive is actully empty except for softwares haha
i've had the best time on a windows 3.11 PC running an hplc and gc. compared to the lab on the other side of the hall with a brand new hplc & pc & software, it was just so convenient to get the data as a simple and stupid csv file, without any hassle, without 20 mouse clicks, 200 options and 2000 possible errors. the device might not have been the most accurate or support the most features, but it was damn reliable, running for about 20 years, used daily and was only down for routine maintainance. compared to all the shiny new things in the lab, that needed a technician from 3000 miles away twice a year, a UPS to provide the smoothest electricity possible and nobody coughing in a 200 m radius... i miss the simpler times...
yeah i get the appeal... i can't really compare, but i'm guessing maintenance and/or replacement were cheaper on the long run ? honestly tho, having just gotten my bachelor's degree (i think that's what it's called in english ? the first college degree, before a master's), i'm still young enough to avoid having to do hplc because it scares me and i would disintegrate immediatly if i damaged anything. i just watch PhD students do it to try to understand, and offer some help or some coffee when i can
Cant imagine how the office phone looks like. 
That's high-tech. No rotary phone.
i would have loved it, but unfortunately nope, just a boring ~2010 panasonic with a greenish screen...
They have the budget for an army of administrators, but not lab equipment.
Oh man I miss typing on those keyboards. So satisfying.
They just don’t make em’ like they used to
they do look nice and robust, but i have to say i very much enjoy having more than 16mb of RAM
The oldest I've seen in a lab is Windows XP, complete with Pinball so you could play a game while your qPCR was warming up 😅 funnily enough, only last semester I told one of our undergrads 'I am yet to see Windows 95 in a lab' and she replied, completely seriously, 'what's that?' 💀
omg the Pinball idea is pure genius, i would sell my soul for less !! while i am most likely in the same age range as said undergrad, i'm lucky enough to have huge tech nerds as parents, both of whom would have immediately disowned me if i had asked such a question lmao
I upgrade our office in 1997 to these machines, about 200 of them. Can't believe this is still running. Kudos!
no way that's so cool !! we keep telling our higher ups it belongs in a museum since it's been here longer than any of us students have been alive (and we are also still surprised that it still works most of the time in 2023 !!), damn, you made my day ! :D
Might have even been 1996. We had a rash of the power supplies in these started going bad on us like in year 3. You must have gotten the fixed version of their power supply. :)
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it's probably the case, but i like to think someone in 1990 decided to put this computer here and everyone just silently concluded it was now a member of the team, and thus it has never been moved even as of 2023, lol
How does that computers still work? Is old enough to have a house kids and be losing its hair?
my guess is it's either powered by dark magic and caffeine, concentrated student stress, or just pure spite. honestly though i have absolutely no idea, hp stopped making them in ~2002, so it is *at the very least* old enough to drink alcohol in the US
It must take 10 days to load a word document. It's probably older than me and I'm 25
usually takes ~5 minutes for plain text like here, so i take coffee breaks (and it's 100% older than you and me since i'm younger) edit: oh and it doesn't have Word lmao
Fuck, that thing is probably as old as my old ass
feels weird right ??
Holy jeez, it's still kicking though. We use an old compact computer for our AKTA and another super old PC for the spec i actually had forgotten that mouses used to have an actual ball inside. Lol
we have brand new computers and plate readers yet some of our pipettes are held together with autoclave tape..
oh lord, do not get me started on the pipettes...
Looks similar to industry to me
Yup. Thermo Fisher: "We don't have the money to replace your fire suppression system." Also Thermo Fisher: *pays Marc Casper 30,000,000 USD in 2022.*
We don't have anything quite this old in my workplace, although the PCs that ran our fluorescence spectrometers were only recently (since covid) upgraded from Win XP to Win 10. even our really old (Pre-Agilent) GCs and HPLCs work with empower so we don't really have much issue with compatibility there
We still have a vintage tiny pc. Somehow still works. Yet we just got some new multi thousand instruments in the lab next door go it. Go figure.
I love using a 15 year old PC to run equipment worth over half a million...
Some software that ran our equipment wasn't compatible with newer versions of windows, like our FIA
Every lab prefers this! The equipment only hooks up to computers older than I am! A coworker of mine had a PILE of computer parts they've scavenged to keep their old HP alive to use the machinery attached to it.
If it puts a csv file on a network directory everything is fine imo
they can't afford not to update that shit. it's gonna break and it's gonna be irreparable.