Small businesses can sometimes be famous for their stubbornness. After all, once you’ve got something that works, why change?
That’s what one automobile shop in Gdansk, Poland has managed to do. The company’s business has been using a C64 — the same 1994 model with 64kb of RAM and a blistering 1MHz CPU — for 25 years.
According to a user translation of the original post, the C64 handles the drive shaft calibrations. Custom software was built for the auto shop and even though the system was “flooded through a leaking window … and most likely shat on by birds” the aging icon of computing is still going strong today.
If it ain’t broke…
Comments
8 responses to “Polish Auto Shop Still Runs Off A Commodore 64”
Comes as no surprise. Some banks even used that same system for many years for the same reasons.
Heck, thanks to enthusiasts and the home-brew community, there are adapters that can allow such machines to communicate with the new world.
Absolutely. Banks holding onto systems well past their use by date was how my family ended up with very cheap 286s…. which is how I ended up gaming from a very early age.
Always nice to see tech that doesn’t die.
There is progress and there is progress if that makes any sense.
Personally I myself have some hold hardware lying round. Some of it using the old OSes because I have vintage games I still play from time to time.
My real guilty pleasure is I still have a Snow Leopard Mac about that I have solely for word processing in LaTeX; it’s all I need.
A lot of upgrades today are less for updates/fixes and more for the hell of it to turn a buck.
I was at an ANZ branch not too long ago, and there computers were using XP, running IE6, that was running some sort of crazy in browser emulation of some ancient white on blue ascii screen (think old BIOS setup screens).
And this was just for data entry.
So I can only thing this wasn’t about rigidity of the system, it was about not being bothered to train the staff in a new system.
Training is a huge part. Federal government held back on Windows 7 and new versions of office in some departments for years because of the training costs involved.
Is nothing. For trabant good making we use mighty amstrad cpc. Is only computer powerful enough to penetrate duroplast.
Looks like the Commodore is keeping up with us after all.
That’s nothing. I work for one of the biggest telecoms in America and our UNIX database was once the largest on earth. Only 5 years ago we were still using FOUR COLOR MONITORS to speak to a system created in the late 70s.
Here you can see this in action http://trojmiasto.tv/Commodore-64-maszyna-do-wywazania-walow-napedowych-17702.html