this post was submitted on 10 Nov 2025
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This stuff is inconsequential in the grand scheme of things. These are appliances, not workstations. They should have no custom software installed on them that the manufacturer didn't put there. There are IT implications involved with running embedded systems based on obsolete operating systems software, but there is nothing you can do about these systems as an end user besides isolating them to their own highly restricted subnet.
The story is exactly the same in manufacturing. There is a lot of CNC machinery based on unsupported versions of Windows. You're not getting service from Microsoft, and the only good thing your IT department can do with these machines is create a back-up image of the hard drives and whatever floppy disks / CD ROMs they find inside the electrical cabinet. If you actually wipe the thing and re-install Windows from scratch (let alone anything else), it will never work again unless you fly a service technician out for a full week. The configuration of these machines is very fragile, based on top of a ton of undocumented in-house drivers for hardware which isn't even available on the open market, and a lot of settings which need to be adjusted based on which motor they happened to have in the warehouse in the particular month it was assembled.
This kind of machinery has nothing to do with what operating system or productivity software is used throughout the office.
I can relate to the FileMaker thing though. This is exactly what the company I work at is doing. They've got something like 30 internal applications based on it and an expensive ERP system and for better or worse it will be around until the company goes under. Lord knows why they didn't just use a Postgres database. They're paying multiple salaried in-house software developers anyway. They would have saved literally millions of dollars in licensing.