Bork!Bork!Bork! It isn't only a computer's software underbelly exposed during a bork. Sometimes the poor thing's innards are on show as engineers attempt to wring a little more life from long-expired systems.
Spotted by an eagle-eyed Register reader in delightful Portugal, today's fail comes courtesy of the nation's rail network or, in this case, the ticket-selling machinery.
The machine looks as though it's had a hard life, and we're not sure we'd want to go jabbing that touchscreen. However, a tougher life has been led by the software running behind the scenes: Windows 2000 Professional – that famously hard-to-kill operating system.
Microsoft finally called time on the software in 2010 after ending mainstream support more than 20 years ago, in 2005.
However, as evidenced in Portugal (and in customer-facing devices around the world), Windows 2000 did not go gentle into that good night. A stepping stone from Windows NT 4.0, the operating system formerly known as NT 5.0 has continued to run thanks, in part, to hardware requirements that seem positively quaint by today's standards, and a general bomb-proof nature that would be the envy of many of today's platforms.
Assuming, of course, you don't plug it directly into the internet.
As well as Windows 2000 Professional, we were delighted to note that the ticket kiosk features a keyboard inside. Back when this writer used to prowl datacenter corridors, poking a rack to make a keyboard and screen fold out represented the pinnacle of design technology. Such things would probably be regarded as antiquated in the lights-out behemoths of today, so seeing the hardware live on within a Portuguese ticket machine is enough to generate a nostalgic thrill.
There's no mouse visible, but we're sure that any engineer worthy of the title could easily navigate their way through Windows 2000 without needing such fripperies.
When Microsoft finally released Windows 2000 to manufacturing, as the last century drew to a close, the company claimed the operating system, which apparently outperformed Windows 95, 98, and NT 4 on 64 MB of memory, was "an ideal platform for the next generation of business computing."
So much so that Windows 2000 continues to endure well into the 2020s as engineers squeeze every last ounce of life from the software and the hardware it runs on. ®
Source: The register