STILL BOOTING AFTER ALL THESE YEARS: The people stuck using ancient Windows computers.
In 2024, Windows was at the centre of a controversy across the German internet. It started with a job listing for Deutsche Bahn, the country’s railway service. The role being recruited was an IT systems administrator who would maintain the driver’s cab display system on high-speed and regional trains. The problem was the necessary qualifications: applicants were expected to have expertise with Windows 3.11 and MS-DOS – systems released 32 and 44 years ago, respectively. In certain parts of Germany, commuting depends on operating systems that are older than many passengers.
A Deutsche Bahn spokesperson says that’s to be expected. “Our trains have a long service life and are in operation for up to 30 years or longer.” Deutsche Bahn regularly modernises its trains, the spokesperson says, but systems that meet safety standards and prove themselves stable are generally kept in operation. “Windows 3.11 is also exclusively used in a small number of trains for operating displays only.”
It’s not just German transit, either. The trains in San Francisco’s Muni Metro light railway, for example, won’t start up in the morning until someone sticks a floppy disk into the computer that loads DOS software on the railway’s Automatic Train Control System (ATCS). Last year, the San Francisco Municipal Transit Authority (SFMTA) announced its plans to retire this system over the coming decade, but today the floppy disks live on. (The SFMTA did not respond to a request for comment.)
Shades of the New Yorker cover from 2013, which showed Obama with Gordon Gekko’s brick-sized cell phone and Kathleen Sebelius crossing her fingers while Jay Carney nervously inserted a five-inch floppy disk into the TRS-80-era Obamacare server. Not to mention the speeches that Newt Gingrich was giving during the heady Contract With America days of 1994 and 1995, when he would hold up in one hand a vacuum tube, and in the other a microchip. As he explained, vacuum tubes were still in use in some FAA-regulated Air Traffic Control towers in America.
Perhaps some are still in use: Air traffic controllers working with ‘World War II technology.’ Interview: Randy Babbitt, former FAA administrator.
