An '80s-era Amiga controls the heating for an entire school district

[jakeXT]

Think the Windows XP workstation you use at the office is ancient? It doesn't hold a candle next to what the Grand Rapids Public School district is using to control its climate systems. All 19 schools covered by the authority depend on a nearly 30-year-old Commodore Amiga 2000 to automate their air conditioning and heating. It communicates to the other schools using a pokey 1,200 baud modem and a wireless radio so behind the times that it occasionally interferes with maintenance workers' walkie talkies. Oh, and a high school student wrote the necessary code -- if something goes wrong, the district has to contact the now middle-aged programmer and hope that he can fix it. It's a testament to the dependability of the Amiga in question, but you probably wouldn't want to trust the well-being of thousands of students to a computer that's probably older than some of the teachers.

There's a good reason why the school district has been hanging on to this vintage solution for so long. Replacing it with a modern system could cost up to $2 million dollars, which isn't exactly chump change when an HVAC controller upgrade is usually low on the priority list. There may be relief in sight, however. If the electorate passes a $175 million bond proposal, the district will have the cash it needs to replace its Amiga with a computing platform that was built sometime this century.

http://www.engadget.com/2015/06/14/amiga-controls-school-district-hvac/

[TreasonousBastard]

1. My head just exploded...

I wrote a lot of BASIC code for Atari and Commodore computers of that era and the neat thing about that back then is that the stuff just worked. No bullshit, no C++ compiler, no graphics, no Registry-- just "if this, do that"

So, why does modernizing the obviously simple concepts of that system cost up to 2 million bucks?

[jakeXT]

2. The video mentions that it's a radio controlled system, maybe a new one would use cables

So laying all the cables and hiding them to every school building would cost some money, I would imagine.

[TreasonousBastard]

3. Possibly, but I was thinking along the lines of how many...

things now involve a Windows server and vast amounts of complex programming to do a few simple tasks.

For instance, I once wrote a simple 500 line program to replace an obsolete cash register line. Pop an Intel motherboard into the existing case, hook it up to the printer and keypad and it was ready to go. A very simple polling network system worked with it.

So, I've been working with our county's voting machines and they do exactly the same things-- count a list of stuff. And that's without having to deal with an ingredient list for reordering.

But, what do they do? A special version of Windows and megabytes of secret compiled C programming to do exactly the same thing. Less even-- just adding up the votes.

[47of74]

4. I read somewhere once that...

...we have the GUI interface to thank for the increase in the size of the programs these days. If you look at the old programs they had very simple interfaces compared to the intensive GUI programs we have today.

[TreasonousBastard]

5. That's probably the biggest part of it, but, then there's the vacuum theory...

you know, how nature abhors a vacuum. As we find computers more capable of doing things, we insist on doing them-- needed or not.

A while ago, I put together a few websites using pretty straight HTML. Look at the code and it says, basically "show this text..." Show this graphic..." and the code would usually be way less than a page per viewable page.

Open up any webpage today and look at the pages of code. And note how long the page takes to load! Besides the Flash and other stuff, the page will be contacting a dozen other sites trading information, doing who knows what to your computer in the background.

And it's all just because they can.

[jakeXT]

6. I imagine you could do that simple stuff in assembler on the 68k Motorola of the Amiga

But now anything needs a good graphical user interface and probably the latest network connection hardware.


Every time I see an ATM boot up, it's a weird feeling.


http://www.esecurityplanet.com/windows-security/atms-on-windows-xp-how-risky-is-it.html

[TreasonousBastard]

7. Back then everything came with a BASIC interpreter...

that could do all the "basics."

Once in a while you might need some machine code for something, like a device driver or complex math function, but this sort of thing is simple if-then logic, or arithmetic. Even back in those days you could buy simple logic chips to do this stuff-- the trick then was to design a whole system around that logic chip.

Yeah, it weirds me out, too, when I see the Windows logo in the strangest places. I suspect it's just easier to plug stuff into Windows where all the networking and drivers are built in. FWIW, when I started using the MS BASIC compiler, it added huge and unnecessary libraries to make monstrous executables, but it was easy and required little typing. I ended up using another compiler that made executables less than half the size, but with a lot more typing. And still needed Windows.

[47of74]

8. I remember seeing a photo kiosk reboot at a Walgreens

That was a Kodak branded kiosk running on Windows 2000. It's long gone and hopefully the kiosk there now runs on something a bit more advanced, such as Windows 7.

Where I work there's been a big push to get off XP and on to Windows 7.

[valerief]

9. School commissioner must be a Halt and Catch Fire fan. nt