Many large and expensive CNC and industrial production systems are still running on old legacy motherboards and operating systems, with motherboards with socket 478 Celeron CPUs, IDE drives and ISA slots still being commonplace.
PCs running on Windows 2000 and even Windows 98 still control the main production machines of many factories. Many of these motherboards have been working successfully for 10 or more years and earned the companies using them millions.
Failure of these motherboards, CPUs and systems can result in very expensive downtime. Loss of production can run to thousands if not millions of Rands. If this loss is compared to the cost of holding suitable spares of the motherboards and CPUs running these machines, the question must be asked why companies are not holding these critical spares.
In many cases the operating systems of these machines cannot be changed because the control software is dependent on the operating system. Similarly the legacy operating system will not run on newer CPUs and motherboards because the software drivers are incompatible with newer chipsets on newer motherboards. Finding compatible motherboards with the right chipsets, CPUs and software drivers is a challenge.
An example of a suitable motherboard is the MB800 available from Centurion Microelectronics. This motherboard has ISA and PCI cards slots and makes use of a socket 478 CPU. It also has drivers available for DOS, Windows 98, Windows 2000, Windows ME and Windows NT 4.0.
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