It was back in March last year when Valve announced it would be killing off Steam support for Windows 7, 8, and 8.1 on January 1, 2024....
      • Kid_Thunder@kbin.social
        1·
        6 months ago

        We used to have a borescope that saved pictures and some jet engine engineers always requested them when we checked for fuel coking. The thing was heavy, massive and ran on Windows 3.1. It would save one picture at it’s highest resolution on a single floppy but wouldn’t have enough space for another. So for each picture, we had to load in a new floppy. Then find the floppy drive with a USB.

        I put a new borescope in the budget and it got knocked off for other stuff of course. As far as I know, they’re still using it because a company that profits billions per year and hundreds of millions on this project couldn’t afford a new one.

        • Snot Flickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
          0·
          6 months ago

          Why not use a Windows 3.1 VM in DOSBox and use a local directory as your C drive so you can easily add and remove files from the Win3.1 instance?

          Unless the borescope has have physical hardware that can run Win3.1?

          Virtual Machines have really kind of solved the “but I need old software” issue.

          • Kid_Thunder@kbin.social
            1·
            6 months ago

            Well, the borescope is running on an old archaic motherboard with ISA slots to do everything so I just didn’t really care enough to try to do anything with it at that point mostly because the fiberscope was garbage as well. At that point I might as well have built a new one but there’s no way they would have funded it so I wasn’t going to.

          • MomoTimeToDie@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
            14·
            6 months ago

            You’d be surprised how often the actual, physical hardware is just chugging along on “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” mindset.

        • tal@lemmy.todayEnglish
          0·
          6 months ago

          Honestly, how expensive is a borescope these days?

          I picked up a cheap USB one to look at my garbage disposal’s interior a while back. I think it was something like $50.

          Now, I can believe that this jet engine one is fancier, but unless it images outside the visible spectrum or has to be inserted into a recently-running, hot engine and survive hot temperatures or something, I doubt that it’s that much fancier. There’s only so much that a CCD and light on the end of a cable can do.

          • Kid_Thunder@kbin.social
            1·
            6 months ago

            To view the coking, you really need a very small and long endoscope with it. You really didn’t get that with the $50 borescopes back then. Most of them at that price point wouldn’t allow change outs either. Now you can get them with changeable endoscopes, decent video and recording of course fairly cheap.

    • SSUPII@sopuli.xyzEnglish
      1·
      6 months ago

      Compiling a personal project of mine with Windows 2000 as minimum Windows platform right now