So I'm redoing everything for the DELL PC that ran Zara, and I am not back on the air as of today. I found an image disk of WIN 7 and downloaded it. Checking details, but plan to upload it on the DELL and run Zara and the station. Wish me well.
Here's some very recent XP in the news, and it's not only the US, other countries are also still maintaining such infunstructures with floppy disk and "obsolute" technologies.
US air traffic control still runs on Windows 95 and floppy disks
...the Federal Aviation Administration plans to replace its aging air traffic control systems, which still rely on floppy disks and Windows 95 computers, ...
"The whole idea is to replace the system. No more floppy disks or paper strips,"... ...Some controllers currently use paper strips to track aircraft movements and transfer data between systems using floppy disks, while their computers run Microsoft's Windows 95 operating system, which launched in 1995.
....The FAA isn't alone in clinging to floppy disk technology. San Francisco's train control system still runs on DOS loaded from 5.25-inch floppy disks, with upgrades not expected until 2030 due to budget constraints. Japan has also struggled in recent years to modernize government record systems that use floppy disks...
...aviation industry analyst Robert W. Mann Jr. expressed skepticism about whether new systems will actually materialize.
"This has been the same mantra for the past 30 years. Give them more money. They'll build the new system. It'll work better, work harder," Mann told NPR. "And we've been doing that for well over 30 years now, and we've gotten the same results."
I hear a lot of this that many use windows 7 and XP and it's fine. Even for our stations. So I wonder why we are told to upgrade to Windows 11 as support will stop for Windows 10. If it ain't broke why fix it? It's this old idea that everything has to keep changing. You always have to get something new, even when there was nothing wrong with what you have now.
As for floppy disks there's no difference in that than an external SSD or USB drive for storing things except they didn't have much storage space. The only downside is for our playlists for example, needing 250 GB of storage space using floppy disks would need many of them instead of one little thing. So it's a convenience thing. The planes have been flying OK in the USA so if it works what is wrong with it? They are reliable and do the job of storing information.
To add, Imagine the undertaking it would be to convert all the floppy disks to SSD or USB drives.
Follow the money.
Manufacturers and vendors need to introduce new products to maintain their revenue stream and profits. It doesn't matter whether the consumers of said products need them or not.
Heck, they even landed on the moon with 4 bit computer technology.
It's why the major smartphone makers (and Apple is the worst example) don't support micro SD cards - they want you to use their cloud services.
It's also why some software is licensed by the month, rather than an outright license purchase.
And it's also why over-the-air TV (and perhaps radio) is moving towards proprietary subscription services, rather than free with ads (but don't worry, the ads will come later, once they've got you hooked, following the example of Netflix).
Windows 7 and even XP are still usable today. They both have modern browsers (although there are only a few for XP). I wouldn't use either for a server (although Windows 7 is possible, depending on what you're serving), but wouldn't have any problems for most other uses.
TV I could care two hoots about. And radio, well, that's what we're here for.
Something that has always struck me peculiar is the disk space required now.. Remember when a 100mb hard drive and 256mb memory was considered quite large? I recall installing Pagemaker, Photoshop, Corel Draw and a host of other desktop publishing software, they were all installed by using multiple floppy disk - about 4 to 8 floppy disk per program, and when you got done there was still plenty of hard drive space to work with.
Today there is no way you could install any such program on a 100mb hard drive..
And here's the thing.. I never really noticed any improved capabilities of those software's which each new upgrade - The menus get moved around and sometimes would have to figure out how to adjust to the change - I never liked upgrades to software, mainly because it rarely turns out to make much difference other than frustrating me because I have to figure out how to accomplish a task all over again because the old familiar method I had always used has change to an "improve" method.
I forgot what my point was supposed to be. I guess it's that it seems to take massively more proccessing power and hard drive space now, than it did 20 years ago to accomplish the exact same thing. - At least with such programs as mentioned above, and there doesn't appear to be a valid reason for it -- the old versions of such software from 20 years ago are not that different in capabilities then what is out now.
The software development methods of today sacrifice memory and processor efficiency for, at least theoretically, speed of development. IDE's (interactive development environments) and super high level languages carry with them tons of bloatware which may have little to do with the actual application being developed. Developers usually have very little idea what is happening beneath the hood, so to speak, of these methods, and memory efficiency isn't usually top of mind (or even on their mind), so programs keep on getting bigger and bigger.
They can do this, in part, because of massive improvements over the years in terms of memory capacity and processor speed.
There are advantages to these methods, but it still has to be recognized that they're just tools. You can still write crap software utilizing these tools, particularly if you just wade in and start using them without knowing what you want to do.
Software development used to be a lot more structured. It was actually focused on nailing down what you wanted to do before going and actually doing it, because coding was a lot more lower level, and you did have to worry about memory and processor speed. Again, advantages and disadvantages.
@centinel Do you use BUTT for encoding your stream? You'd have to use an early version of it on Windows 7, as I don't think later versions are supported.
Back then you never did what we do now. The programs then were made for the small hard drive space and RAM. The computers back then also had a processor that would be considered a toy now. I remember my father had a Toshiba laptop that had the version of Windows before 95 came out, the 250MB of RAM and a 2 GB hard drive and was upgraded to a wopping 4 GB! That was a high end computer at the time when laptops just came on the market, and a processor that would now not even operate a smartphone but he could install and play flight simulator. Seemed everything needed less power to operate then. But now 100MB would just get 2 OTR episodes, maybe 3, and that would be it!
Think of how much 1500 episodes takes up! Also this for consideration. Think of the power a computer had in 1969 when they went to the moon. Before a home computer existed. A computer took up the space of a whole room in a house and had a processor speed of 0.043 MHZ.
A RAM of 32KB! Now a smartphone has 1 million times the processing power and that isn't a "real" computer yet! And that includes an entry level laptop. And with that puny power they went to the moon? Really? But that's another subject.
Kinda getting off topic, but I remember the first computer I worked on, a DEC PDP-8. It had a 8MB (that's megabytes) hard drive that was about the size of a filing cabinet. The computer itself would fit in a small closet. I can't remember the RAM, but it was in the kilobyte range. And this computer was able to support 4 users.
The PDP-11 successor to this computer was more powerful, and I developed software for it to do computer animation. I remember debugging that software using the front panel switch register to patch in corrections to bugs.
And those computers were 8 bit, not the 4 bit ones that got the U.S. to the moon.
Yes, computers today are orders of magnitude more powerful, but I'm not convinced they're any more useful. Look at what most people use them for - funny videos of cats and dogs, social media, spreading propaganda and conspiracy theories. An argument can be made that the more powerful these things become, the further back it sets humanity as a whole.
...IDE's (interactive development environments) and super high level languages carry with them tons of bloatware which may have little to do with the actual application being developed...
Bloatware.. Larger software programs like photoshop, pagemaker, etc. did not begin becoming these huge installs requiring heavy proccessing capabilities and an excess of hard drive space requirements until after home internet became commonplace. So I suspect the majority of bloatware today consist of internet connectivity related task, and a means of maintaining a tighter grasp on the user.
Back then you never did what we do now. The programs then were made for the small hard drive space and RAM. The computers back then also had a processor that would be considered a toy now....
I get what you're saying but I'm actually suggesting that back then, before internet was commonplace, the software packages - same as today, whatever software you use for whatever.. photo editing, word processing, games, whatever, - those old pre-petium computers can still accomplish the exact same task as today provided you use the old version software. - and it does it with a minuscule fraction of hard drive space.. with as little as 16mb of memory. But the old computers weren't really built for internet, internet was a add-on option. I remember my first 56k modem, I was so excited.
Once you add two-way connectivity to those software programs then the minimum proccessing and space requirements skyrocket into a whole other realm.
...the first computer I worked on, a DEC PDP-8. It had a 8MB (that's megabytes) hard drive that was about the size of a filing cabinet. The computer itself would fit in a small closet. I can't remember the RAM, but it was in the kilobyte range. And this computer was able to support 4 users....
I think I've talked about it before but that sounds exactly like what was in Tennessee High School upstairs in the library. I went there in 1977-78. It was in a locked glassed-in room, and had four terminals in the room next to it (also glassed in) that students could check out and reserve time on. I use to program games on it, you saved your program by inserting a heavy paper tape about an inch or so wide into a slot and it perforated the tape as it drew it in.. You then retrieved the tape and roll it up for storage untill the next time you wanted to load, edit or run the program you would just feed the ticker tape back in.
...Only that computer in Tenn. wouldn't had fit in a small closet.. it was huge and had at least two huge reels
I loved windows XP, it was the best operating system windows ever had in my opinion. I ran XP for years after it's so called end of life. But the computer it was on the processor kicked out. And couldn't be replaced. And couldn't get it to work that well on newer computer after that. I forced to buy a new computer it had that awful windows 8 to 8.1 on it, that was upgraded to 10 when it came out. I recently got a windows 11 pro computer, that's a refurb. I got that mostly for things like online transactions etc. I was going to put the automation on it. But decided to keep it on the windows 10 machine for now. It doesn't do much outside of the automation and makes a network connection twice a day, for two programs I take live.
I loved windows XP, it was the best operating system windows ever had in my opinion. I ran XP for years after it's so called end of life. But the computer it was on the processor kicked out. And couldn't be replaced. And couldn't get it to work that well on newer computer after that. ..
I couldn't agree more, but I would have just bought another old laptop or pc, they're a dime dozen, nobody really wants them, you can pick them up for like $25-$50 or even free if your lucky.
I had installed XP (usually stripped down with N-lite) on countless old computers, it's what I'd like to now on a tiny mini-PC, but since its newer (last 10 years) not sure XP can be installed on it without having driver issues.. but I will give it a try, - or buy an even older one for XP install
@richpowers At that time I couldn't find one that was working. It was like 5 or so years after EOL. I picked up a used computer and installed it, but it would never work properly on that machine.