11
Comments
  • 7
    I hope not for prod
  • 5
    i believe some do
  • 0
    I believe I've seen it used few times in last couple of years.
  • 4
    Yes, blue Inc and the British licence checking agency for the police road side checks
  • 1
    Most cashiers in the US
  • 4
    I've upgraded to DDOS. :-)
  • 1
    Only for flashing bios xD
  • 0
    Ha yea in my country they are still being used in embedded environments like old ass accounting softwares and cashiers.
  • 1
    I work in security software and our company was doing a upgrade for a major muesum here in the US. Millions of dollars of stuff from paintings and furniture and I looked over to this green CRT monitor and said "what does that system do" . They said it is their fire control system.

    I was like WTF! Does your insurance company know using that piece of crap.

    I started writing code in the late 70s early 80s BASIC and Pascal stuff like that. I just couldn't believe they were actually using the system for such an important part of protecting their assets. the kicker is they had no plans of replacing it. that was five years ago I haven't been back but they may still be using it today who knows.
  • 0
    @S-falken and why would it be a piece of crap? DOS is in industrial use also for machine controls and stuff because it doesn't have multitasking and shit. Much less that can go wrong.
  • 1
    @Fast-Nop DOS is pretty old and doesn’t have modern security features. There are a lot of operating systems for microsystems which are updated and have modern security features.
  • 0
    @FilipeRamalho pretty old doesn't mean anything because software doesn't rot. It doesn't need modern security features because it lacks features to be secured in the first place.
  • 1
    @Fast-Nop Software does rot. You can use decryption algorithms like MD4, DES or SHA-0 as they were broken. And when quantum computers become more available other algorithms will become obsolete.
    DOS has important features like handling data and that enables manipulating it.

    Why not just use FREE-DOS ?
  • 0
    @FilipeRamalho good point with obsolete algorithms, but I don't think a fire control system would use them. Why not use Free DOS? Because, why change a running system without need? Fire control systems aren't like JavaScript frameworks.

    Otherwise, DOS has so few features that the attack surface just isn't there. You need a dedicated network, but that would be the case for any system because an overload of office traffic must not congest the fire detection network. If they even use a network for that.

    On top of that, DOS even has an advantage over both Windows and Linux because it doesn't have preemptive multitasking - if only because it doesn't have multitasking at all.
  • 3
    @Fast-Nop okay fair enough. I guess my objection was to the age of the hardware it was running on. It looked to be at least 30 years old, and while I know that hardware back then was much more robust than today's capacitors and such. I couldn't help but to think it was going to die very suddenly and leave them in the lurch.

    Just thought it risky
  • 1
    Yes i still do, i love the djgpp c compiler, messing with os mesa, dithering and etc
  • 2
    Using it for backwards compatibility of electronics drawings on Win XP VMs.
Add Comment