The old PC was still connected to a modem with a dedicated phone line. To this day, unless something drastic has changed, a billion $ company is running DOSBox in production (and I literally mean production).Īlso, a side note.

The first few attempts caused some sirens and alarms to go off in the building, which was 'exiting', but after fiddling with the emulation speed I managed to get it to work. My solution was to copy everything from the old HDD to a new computer, install DOSBox and configure the serial port. Previous upgrade attempts involved virtualization, but that did not work since the program ran too quickly on modern hardware. It was therefore decided that this PC should be replaced/upgrade if possible.Īfter investigating I learned it communicated with a PLC through the RS-232 interface and ran some special sauce software from a company that stopped existing in 1995. This machine had been chucking along since 1992 and now someone high up had been made aware that it could be a potential risk if this machine stopped working. They had an old IBM PC running IBM DOS which controlled a vital system at the beginning of their production line. Back in 2012 I worked at a large manufacturing company.