As technology marches on, some people get trapped using decades-old software and devices. Here's a look inside the strange, stubborn world of obsolete Windows machines.
We are far away from the release of the Raspberry Pi if that screen is running an early version of Windows CE. Putting a PC in the elevator to drive the screen was probably the most cost effective solution.
There's not particularly good reason to stop doing it in that scenario either.
You have an offline technology stack in that elevator that has been doing the job correctly for 20 years. Why take on the expense and risk of changing things that aren't currently broken?
It would be crazy if you are building new to resort to that stack, but for an established elevator, why bother?
Same for some old oscilloscopes at work. I'm not crazy about the choice but I can hardly suggest it would be practical to change it while the oscilloscopes still do their function.
I would say it's a problem if the stack is online, but if it is self contained, the age of the software doesn't make it a problem in and out itself.
In highrises with lots of stops and users, it uses some more advanced software to schedule the optimal stops, or distribute the load between multiple lifts. A similar concept exists for HDD controllers, where the read write arm must move to different positions to load data stored on different plates and sectors, and Repositioning the head is a slow and expensive process that cuts down the data transfer rate.
This requires little more than a 286. It's an elevator. Responding in times measured in seconds. What kind of computations do you think are required here? Imaginary quaternion matrixes? Squared?
Yes, but if you have it as a Windows program it's easier to configure on a screen with mouse and keyboard, change settings, display help files or give the source code to someone else to make changes or add features.
also it was probably not too expensive to grad a bog standard PC off the shelf and do it on that. I've see raspis in the wild doing tasks like that. and those will be outdated by the time they're replaced too