Russia’s Retro Lenin Museum Still Runs on Decades-Old Apple II Computers

[lb1lf]

If it gets the job done, it gets the job done.

One of the CNC machines in our workshop was controlled by a MicroVAX until recently. Did what we asked it to.

[tenebrisalietum]

Right there is the problem with a lot of newer things. It does things other than what you ask it to, like upload telemetry, consume your bandwidth to deliver advertisements, or reboot for updates.

[tambourine_man]

The problem is when it stops doing its job.

How much are Apple II parts? How easy is it to find people with the know-how? How much do they charge? How about 10 years from now?

Long term tech is hard. We haven't had time to figure it out yet.

[tombert]

I do worry that the power consumption might be far too high for the amount of value you're getting out of it. I mean, a Raspberry Pi Zero probably has more computing power than an Apple II, while using a small fraction of the power. You could probably retrofit the software to work relatively well on an Apple II emulator on the Raspberry Pi, for that matter.

Increasingly I've been getting a bit worried about these "it gets the job done" mentalities; are the environmental externalities actually being properly accounted for?

[crtlaltdel]

yeah worked with a win3.1 box for a long time that was never shutdown on purpose (on a ups and we had back up generators). we ran midi tests of our hw with it. it was shutdown permanently in some time in 2010.

[petra]

Aren't newer CNC machines much more effective,and slowly replacing older machines ?

[mac_was]

Exactly what I wanted to post.

[Andrew_nenakhov]

It isn't called a retro museum for nothing!

(also, this is very symbolic. every former soviet union citizen knows that Lenin foresaw the advent of thinking machines, calling this as inevitable as an apple falling down from a tree - from Lenin Collected Works, letter to Julius Martov, 1903)

[hybrids]

Is there an English translation of this somewhere? I googled around and couldn't seem to find it.

[rinchik]

There was a thread about how to write zero maintenance apps, feels related.

Isolated, stuck in time envs are a must.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21192885

[exhilaration]

Al Eisenstat, who accompanied [Steve] Jobs, recalled him talking about creating AI simulations of Soviet revolutionaries: “The one thing we can’t do is to ask them a question and get their current thinking. Ahh, but in the future you are going to have artificial intelligence and you’ll be able to ask Mr. Lenin a question or Mr. Trotsky a question.”

[trhway]

>in the future you are going to have artificial intelligence and you’ll be able to ask Mr. Lenin a question or Mr. Trotsky a question.

giving the amount of Lenin's writings https://www.cmlt.ru/getUserImage?id=17690783

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Lenin_bibliography#Co... :

"His Collected Works comprise 54 volumes, each of about 650 pages, translated into English in 45 volumes "

i wonder what future we can already preview by training GPT-2 on it. Add to that a voice model built using his voice recordings and upload the combined model as a "Talk to/Ask Lenin" skill to Alexa... Caused the memory to dig out that USSR propaganda slogan - "Lenin is more alive than anyone living" (i kid you not - "Lenin zhivee vseh zhivyh").

[orthecreedence]

"You look for the person who will benefit, and uh, uh you know, uh you know you’ll uh, uh well...you know what I'm trying to say."

- AI Lenin

[awiesenhofer]

Ah, I can relate. While not as old as these, all the interactive stations at my parents museum still run on ancient win nt 4 boxes connected via bnc. Guess who they call when one breaks again...

[tombert]

I worked on at a company that was running all their billing software on DOS with FoxPro (I was there in 2012).

We eventually "upgraded" them to a VM running OS/2 on a Windows XP machine (I wasn't able to get it working with DosBox or FreeDOS)...Management didn't want to give us budget to rewrite it in a modern language, sadly.

[AzzieElbab]

About 10 years ago I saw a Soviet clone of IBM/360 in a mid size Russian investment bank

[nikolay]

Those probably are Pravetz 82 [0] - the Bulgarian clone of Apple ][.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pravetz_computers

[gattilorenz]

I also thought so, but in the article it says they are original Apple IIs imported via a front company.

Unrelated: I always found the II ][ and // naming so confusing...

[efrafa]

Elevetors in our building(SF fin. district) runs even older ones.

[Nr7]

Reminds me of this article about an old Amiga computer running the AC system for multiple schools: https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/infrastructure/a...

[winrid]

Wonder how the replacement is going.

[craz8]

Back in the 80s I worked in a place running on Apple IIs

The biggest problem we had then was floppy disks physically wearing out, as they were running all day

Did someone corner the market in 5 1/4 floppies to handle cases such as this? Does this museum have enough supply to keep running?

[jacobush]

There are floppy emulators now, they could use those. Also if the diskettes are read only once per boot, they don't get much wear.

[luismedel]

I hope they don't update to Catalina if they want the old software to run /s