German railway seeks IT admin to manage MS-DOS and Windows 3.11 systems

Misleading title: SIEMENS Mobility is looking for said Windows 3.11 admin. NOT the German Railway

Legacy hardware and operating systems are battle tested, having been extensively probed and patched during their heyday. The same can be said for software written for these platforms – they have been refined to the point that they can execute their intended tasks without incident. If it is ain't broke, don't fix it. One could also argue that dated platforms are less likely to be targeted by modern cybercriminals. Learning the ins and outs of a legacy system does not make sense when there are so few targets still using them. A hacker would be far better off to master something newer that millions of systems still use.

Tell me you know nothing about cybersecurity without telling me you know nothing about cybersecurity. Wtf is this drivel?

Ooh, someone is about to make BANK!

Imagine both the annoyance and job security having to manage MS-DOS and 3.1 systems for a railroad would entail.

We're maintaining and developing OpenVMS OS, and both we and our customers need Cobol, Fortran, and other half-dead languages coders.
Many large companies maintain their old systems and use them for production or data processing purposes. Sometimes it's too expensive to migrate off, but im many cases "it just works"

Do I get to move to Germany for this?

Better hope those systems are not network enabled

10/10 would install Doom on it.

At least it's not windows 8.

Remote? Do you connect yourself over telnet or what?

Migrating to FreeDOS might be feasible for them.

Not gonna lie, part of me wants to relive the SoundBlaster and DOS extenders era and watch stuff with QuickTime. Tinkering with config.sys and autoexec.bat was quite fun back then.

If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

Thats the reason, why they have Problems to find drivers (If you know, what i mean) 😜

Why use MS-DOS? Why don't we just re-write it in Rust?

Edit: I should have mentioned /s in my comment. It's never a good idea to rewrite a mission-critical software.

Sign me up if you're paying $300k+

I know a guy fitted for the job. He's well versed in MS-DOS, Win 3.1, 3.11 etc. Hell, he's even fluent in German, but he's due a hip and knee replacement this month...

That's all I'm gonna say.

Those where the days! <3

Eternal September

Let's hope the salary is decent.

Time for a rewrite

Yeah, but it will feel like 16MB on a Mac. PowerPC.

If it works, don't change it!

Based

C:>WIN

Reminds me of the lessons from Chad Fowler’s talk on “Legacy”. https://youtu.be/P4xSmYr7PEg

Can I install Linux on the old systems so they work better?

Just saw a video and certain instruments/displays on trains (original ICE 3 for example) run with Windows 3.11, so thats probably why they are searching for one