John VanSickle wrote:

> The primary reason that old processors stay in production, even the (by 
> today's standards) ancient 386, is probably because of institutions that 
> buy proprietary-design items for their use and keep them in service for 
> many years.  The US military has a lot of old technology in its 
> equipment; electronic equipment designed in the 50's often lasted well 
> into the 80's.
> 
> At times a company will adopt a certain software package, become highly 
> dependent on it, and find that newer hardware will not run it.  For a 
> while, using old technology is cheaper than buying the new.

The way I heard it, old CPUs never die, they just move down the food chain.

You know what the world's most popular CPU is? Apparently it's the Z80. 
They put it on toasters, washing machines and other devices that you 
don't even think of as "computers". It's a known design that you can 
cheaply buy off the shelf, it's more than adaquat to run a toaster, 
there are huge amounts of library code available off the shelf, and lots 
of developers that know how to target it.

The printer we have at work? It's powered by a Pentium-III. No sane 
person would put one in a *computer*, but in a printer? Well, it only 
needs to run a PostScript interpretter and the robotics of the printer. 
(And the front-panel display.) It's actually overkill - I mean, until 
some mad bugger asks it to procedurally draw a Mandelbrot set image...

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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