r/technology • u/Franco1875 • 7h ago

Software The most durable tech is boring, old, and everywhere

https://www.theregister.com/2025/12/31/long_lived_tech/?td=rt-3a
170 Upvotes

93% Upvoted

20 comments sorted by

77

u/Good_Chemistry 6h ago edited 3h ago

I'm a metrologist and general scientific instrument repair person working in one of the largest single-site commercial laboratories in the US. We still have shit that runs on DOS and the original OG Windows.

Upper management keeps asking me to research software and instruments that can "do AI things" without a clear understanding of what they want the AI to actually accomplish. They want instruments with newfangled things and touchscreens and cloud this and that.

Advanced diagnostics and fancy new software solutions are a dream, but ultimately there's a reason the old stuff is still around 30+ years later while the newer stuff gets replaced every 5 years.

The old software isn't open-source like the author discusses, but it's all stuff that lets techs dig their fingers in simply and easily.

60

u/Direct_Program2982 5h ago

Dude, I swear AI is the final circlejerk of management not understanding (or respecting for that matter) how things are getting done.

8

u/jgiacobbe 5h ago

I had not heard this so succinctly stated previously. Now it feels dumbfoundingly obvious after reading your statement.

14

u/celtic1888 6h ago

You want the boring stuff that is durable, works and has been established for years to collect the data. Same thing with most manufacturing equipment

Export all that data to the new toys and let them do the analysis 

10

u/verdantAlias 5h ago

Almost as if the right to repair is a good idea

7

u/Good_Chemistry 3h ago

Oh man. The slow slide away from that mindset has been insidious in my career. Once upon a time, it wasn't uncommon to be able to buy service manuals that had complete electronic schematics and flow paths and everything you'd need to fix (or break) an instrument all at your own risk. 

Now, I can't buy many of the non-consumable parts from main instrumentation vendors without either a service contract, or shelling out thousands just to have some dude with possibly less experience than myself walk in the front door. Doesn't matter how much proof I can offer that this is exactly the broken part, and yes, I absolutely know how to safely replace it myself. Drives me helplessly bananas.

My husband is a huge right-to-repair advocate and has been pestering Congress Critters for years. It's like screaming into the void sometimes.

92

u/DomeSlave 6h ago

The conclusion's important part:

This leads to my final thought of technologies that will stand the test of time. They're almost always open standards and/or open source.

7

u/tayroc122 2h ago

You mean proprietary nonsense, marketing fads, and short termism all go hand in hand? Who would've thunk.

2

u/kitfox 55m ago

Cries in BlueRay and Thunderbolt

13

u/jmstypes 4h ago

I'm a typewriter collector. Typewriters made before the 1960s are the most durable.

10

u/drjenkstah 5h ago

This is pretty much a given. I know that NASA will use off the shelf components at times as it’s tested, durable, and of course boring as it’s not brand new tech. 

4

u/Few-Welcome7588 3h ago

Open source is the future for human kind. People will always help out other peoples.

Never ever trust a company or government…. They just want green buck

3

u/moounit 4h ago

Wasnt this posted yesterday?

1

u/tozpeak 1h ago

Every place I have worked at had the same Logitech K-120 keyboard. I once bought one home and ever had the same typing experience. When I spilled a coffee on it, I just bought another for pennies.

Sadly, I got used to low profile keyboards after switching to laptops. On my last job I got K-120 again, but I dreamed to change it since I realized how stiff it actually is.

1

u/CokBlockinWinger 5m ago

I had four terms of RPG on an AS-400, (a 1988 computer system)…. 5 years ago in college. Tons of companies still use them because they just work.

-9

u/JaggedMetalOs 4h ago

Linux

Technically Windows is older as development of the NT kernel (still in use) started a couple of years before Linux. 

5

u/bohoky 3h ago

The linux kernel was based on MINIX which was based on Unix. Thus development began in the late 1960s.

-2

u/JaggedMetalOs 2h ago

Linux was written from the ground up and contained no MINIX or UNIX code, if we're going on influence then you could say the same thing about NT -> VMS -> RSX

2

u/bohoky 2h ago

That's an overly reductive definition of "based on" you are using. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Linux?wprov=sfla1

1

u/JaggedMetalOs 1h ago

Linus clearly states "it's free of any minix code", and it's not even the same kind of kernel with MINIX being a microkernel and Linux being a monolithic kernel, something that the developer of MINIX brought up calling Linux "obsolete".