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We have a very expensive engraver at our shop, probably to the tune of idk, $20-30 thousand. It's a pretty large, heavy machine. We use it all day long for identification tags on cabinet doors, push button tags, serial ID tags. Absolutely critical to our business and the company that made it went out of business so if the windows 7 laptop that has the software ever dies, it becomes useless.
Shouldn't it be possible to image the drive and deploy it on another laptop?
That’s probably a good idea. A decent amount of old programs can be run on modern equipment if you can create a good disk image and get it virtualized. There’s some edge cases with figuring out I/O and getting timing to work correctly, but I’d say most old tech can be made to work with a reasonable amount of effort.
If over $10k is on the line, there’s almost no reason to not at least try if you can afford the downtime.
I used to work at an airport and they had a internal tracking system for passengers with special requests (mostly for unaccompanied kids).
Anyway it's programmed in assembly and only works on one particular type computer. Even if it runs on a different era appropriate processor apparently this app won't work. So there was a buttload of old motherboards in a store room somewhere so that we could just swap the board out if the computer ever died. It's critical infrastructure that there is no backup for.
So basically I'm pretty sure the way the world ends is because somebody threw away an important floppy disk, and now a nuclear reactor is going into meltdown.
Yeah I would be working day and night to get it running in a VM with version control on the source code.
You can sell it to a Makerspace or just toss on a new main board. Engravers, lasers, CNC machines, mills, etc all operate on the same fundamental principles.
LinuxCNC or Marlin work with practically every piece of hardware that you can imagine. Stepper motors/drivers have 4 wires each. Once you figure out which is which, just plug them into a Beagleboard or something similar, load up the software, and you're good to go. Often with far more capabilities and accuracy.
Plus you keep more tech waste out of landfills.