#legacy-tech

#legacy-tech

"I *really* don't think i486 class hardware is relevant any more," Torvalds said in 2022, noting that while some people may still operate 486 systems they aren't relevant from a kernel development standpoint. "At some point, people have them as museum pieces. They might as well run museum kernels."

Digital typewriters are carving out a niche for a more focused writing experience, stripping things back to the essentials: just you, a keyboard, and your words.

In the nineteenth century, entire railway networks became obsolete almost overnight, not due to physical deterioration, but because of changes in the technical standards that supported them. The expansion of railroads across Europe and North America adopted different track gauges, and as a dominant standard gradually emerged, these infrastructures became incompatible with one another.

The solution, according to Microsoft, is to get rid of it and buy a computer that can run Windows 11. But that's not good enough. This ThinkPad - like millions of other PCs in the same boat - is still perfectly functional.

COBOL, short for Common Business-Oriented Language, is the most widely adopted computer language in history. Of the 300 billion lines of code that had been written by the year 2000, 80 percent of them were in COBOL. It's still in widespread use and supports a large number of government systems, such as motor vehicle records and unemployment insurance; on any given day, it can handle something on the order of 3 trillion dollars' worth of financial transactions.

The very term "personal computer" promises liberty and autonomy; this isn't the bus, but a transistor-powered rocket carrying a payload of rare earth minerals and rainbow hued headlights. The PC shrunk whole industries of work to our desktops, driving our ambitions anywhere they wanted to go.

The DIY centers around the familiar wedge-shaped Slope 45 2×2 LEGO piece, a part historically used in LEGO space-themed sets as a representation of computer terminals inside spacecraft cockpits. Staal enlarged this element to roughly ten times its original size, turning it into a functional housing that blends retro toy aesthetics with contemporary computing power.

The presence of a notch made the floppy write-protected, so you started with a write-enabled floppy, and if you wanted to protect it, you punched a notch at just the right spot.

The MacBook Neo is a $599 laptop ($499 with the educator discount) that disrupts the market, bringing a trimmed-down version of the premium build MacBooks are known for to this lower price point. Yes, there are trade-offs to get the price this low, but Apple has done a good job at managing them.

Pleban's talk, "Hacking the last Z80 computer ever made," was more than just a dive into retro computing. It also explored some of the many strange decisions involved in launching a new range of hardware based on the eight-bit Zilog Z80 chip in 1999 - when the 16-bit computer era was largely over, and just a couple of years before 32-bit x86 chips would be replaced by x86-64.

What telling people to touch grass ignores, in part, is that grass is not all that good to touch. It's itchy and sticky - there could be bugs in there. There's a far more profoundjoyin touching machines, as is shown again and again in Albert Birney's Obex, which functions as both a shrine to and warning about our reliance on technology.

Most businesses, which includes modern ones, invest heavily in technology, but they rarely plan for its eventual and inevitable exit strategy. Generally speaking, companies spend millions on the latest hardware while overlooking the critical phase when those assets reach their end. This lack of planning creates a massive gap in the operational lifecycle of many otherwise successful global organizations. Decisions made at the end of a device's life carry real business risks that can impact the bottom line financially and environmentally speaking.

"If you look at the enterprise, there's just enormous enthusiasm to deploy AI, but the problem is that the infrastructure, the power, and the operational foundation that is required to run it just aren't there," Alex Bouzari, CEO of DDN, told The Register. "And so as a result, it pops up in the financial elements with IT projects getting delayed, the GPUs being underutilized, power costs going up. And so the economics, I think, for lots of organizations don't pencil out because of these challenges."

January 13 marked another milestone for legacy systems, as support for the software - codenamed Longhorn Server - expired for customers that bought Microsoft Premium Assurance (PA). Extended support ended for Windows Server 2008 on January 14, 2020. It was possible to keep the lights on until January 10, 2023, via Extended Security Updates. A fourth year came courtesy of Azure, which took the code to January 9, 2024, but that was it for anyone without PA.

Microsoft has achieved a breakthrough with Project Silica. The technology for long-term data storage now works with borosilicate glass. This is the same material used for cookware and oven doors. The method can store data for up to 10,000 years. Long-term storage of digital information remains a challenge for data centers and archives. Magnetic tapes and hard drives degrade within a few decades, making them less suitable for storing data for future generations.

Windows cloud PCs have gone from Microsoft's side project to the centerpiece of its post‑Windows‑10 strategy. But the story in 2026 is less "death of the PC" and more "merger of PC, cloud, and AI under Microsoft's terms." Today, the most interesting question is not whether Windows moves to the cloud, but how much local control users are willing to surrender in exchange for AI‑infused desktops.

In a paper published in the journal Nature this week, Microsoft researchers now say these long-term storage qualities can be achieved using the same kind of borosilicate glass found in oven doors and Pyrex glassware. In their testing, they were able to etch 258 layers of data totaling roughly 2.02 TB onto a 2 mm thick borosilicate glass plate while achieving write speeds of between 18.4 and 65.9 Mbps depending on the number of laser beams used.

We build production platforms with AI every day, and we work with teams doing the same with their own stack -Cursor, Claude Code, Copilot. The difference shows up fast. By day two, some codebases are already harder to change than they were yesterday. Others keep getting easier. The difference is never the model. It's what the code lands in. The teams we work with that hit a wall? It's always the same story.

Retail point-of-sale systems today offer a wide range of options for peripherals and hardware. Their technical specifications play a major role in selection, and big retailers often choose multiple vendors to reduce a single point of failure. This gives them an advantage to negotiate price or support as well. Technically, these peripherals also require updating with new models and may have new feature sets. This necessitates the redevelopment of point-of-sale applications, increasing development costs.

The Xeon 600 lineup spans the gamut between 12 and 86 performance cores (no cut-down efficiency cores here), with support for between four and eight channels of DDR5 and 80 to 128 lanes of PCIe 5.0 connectivity. Compared to its aging W-3500-series chips, Intel is claiming a 9 percent uplift in single threaded workloads and up to 61 percent higher performance in multithreaded jobs, thanks in no small part to an additional 22 processor cores this generation.