When you think about it, 24 years is not such a long time for a machine to keep doing what it's supposed to be doing. It says something about our profession that we find a 24-year service life surprising.
There are airliners that have been in service for over 50 years.
It's not so much surprising that the machine hasn't broken, but that someone apparently considered it worthwhile to keep it around, having about the compute of a throwaway vape.
I think it just speaks to how quickly the tech has developed. Airliners work more or less the same as they did 50 years ago, computers are vastly different (and vastly more powerful).
I started working on Stratus machines right out of high school... They took me from backwoods New England to Wall St.
The were Awesome machines - don't let those filthy hobbitsis...err..tandem users cloud your judgement. Stratus was pure hardware FT, and tandem... wasn't :-P
Vos was pretty nice too - decent macro language - not all the utils you expect with a unix box, but in terms of the core OS and shell it was pretty good machine .. 40 years later I still love those machines and the career they helped get me into :-D
It is interesting how long server uptime used to be considered a good thing but now the shorter the average runtime the better as it indicates the system was designed to tolerate failures.
We use to run Stratus VOS on Continuum series hardware at a lottery/poker machine company I worked at in the mid 2000's. It handled the jackpot system which decided which of 13,500 poker machines in our state would jackpot at any given time.
A reliable beast - never failed once in the entire time I worked there. Based on PA-RISC if I recall correctly.
Great story, thanks. I wish it said more about the architecture and also VOS.
Speaking of reliable beasts, I own(ed) a HP PA-RISC workstation that never crashed in six years, and it was even purchased refurbished (second hand, and educational rebate, and still the cost of a car in 1996 - but worth every penny).
I'd add "R.I.P. HP 9000 715/75" but of course she is STILL working now, twenty years later, and she is sitting right next to me (also got a second 715/100XC for spare parts in case on day they are needed).
The old workstations were always pretty damn reliable. I’ve got a Sun Ultra 30 in storage. I may grab it and boot it up and see if it still works. Suspect the NVRAM and power supply caps are duff though.
> "This system runs an older version Stratus proprietary VOS operating system, which Hogan believes hasn’t been updated since the early 2000s. “It’s been extremely stable,’ he said."
That's not particularly surprising to be honest. If it's a server operating system, on hardware that doesn't change, there's not really a reason to update the OS unless there's a security problem found
It's not really a security strategy, but running an obscure proprietary operating system on a system which probably isn't connected to the internet means that you're only susceptible to highly targeted attacks by a dedicated foe.
Apparently the latest VOS release was in 2025, which means that somewhere there's a team of developers maintaining it. That's really the thing I find the most interesting, that there exists teams developing operating systems like VOS, strange DOS clones or UnixWare (perhaps less so these days). Must be a strange anonymous life.
Most likely not directly connected. I'm assuming this one is doing process control and any internet access it might have must be mediated by other systems.
Story time: I got handed a ticket to go change a UPS in a “server room”.
I was in Fairbanks visiting family, I had some downtime, so I decided to do some “slumming” to break up the monotony and relive some of the good old days before I was more boardroom than server room.
Besides, a cool grand for what I figured was 2 hours work appealed to me on some “miss the struggles” level, and it was better than walking around the tourist traps or doing video calls at some depressingly fecund coffee shop.
So, I drive up in my borrowed SUV with peeling paint, grab my trusty tool bag I leave with family for adventures like this, and walk boldly through the doors of this apparently normal retail establishment, clipboard in hand. It was 2019, and the smell of denim and factory pressed shirts wafted through my sensorium as I walked through the awkwardly desynchronized automatic doors.
It was a perfectly normal, somewhat 90s nostalgic retail store.., but walking up the stairs (the elevator was out of service) to the second floor, I could just sense that something was a little off.
The office had a smell. I can’t say what it was, it was businesslike, and not unpleasant, but it spoke to me in an unknown language and I was at that moment curiously heartened that my contract was being paid by a 3rd party. It smelled of stagnant ideas, missed opportunities, and a fossilized board of directors.
I’m not just being colorful here in prose. All of these thoughts were projected into my forebrain by some lizard sense I had developed in 40 years of skulking the halls of enterprises large and small. I was involuntarily imagining a half used tin of bengay on the boardroom table, right by the shiny beige speakerphone with the long stroke buttons and the filthy woven grill.
Curious by now about the flood of intuitions, I treaded the slightly dingy burnt orange carpet tiles up to the POC office, checked in, and was shown the door tot the server room. Through there she said, gesturing at a plain flat golden pine door with the elbow thingy at the top. “Through there, straight through, the door at the back. You can’t miss it. I think it’s unlocked.”
Unconcerned with the casual lack of escort (pretty common really), I opened the door and was immediately transported to surreal alternative world. It was dark, there were tens of flickering screens across to the right and one half hanging, flashing fluorescent fixture dangling precariously from the uni-strut above. The suspended ceiling tiles were about 50 percent in attendance.
Fragments littered the floor, and the door closed behind me with a loud thump. for just a moment I was touched by a singular thought….. (run). I shook it off, by now, far too curious to turn back, come what may.
Briefly thinking of my heavy tool bag as a potential weapon, then realizing the ridiculousness of the notion, I let my eyes adjust as I took in the scene with what I confess could only be described as some kind of unhealthy delight.
This was a large room, easily 800 square feet, and a was clearly dedicated to loss prevention surveillance. There was an epic workstation with 2 giant flat screen plasma monitors front and center, and ten smaller monitors on either side. Most of them were dark, and most of the others were flickering with static.a singular monitor had a poor but recognizable image of a small nondescript room with a small desk and two metal chairs, one on each side of the desk in an overtly adversarial position. The image smelled of stale sweat and musty cardboard.
There was seating for two pilots at the helm of this derelict craft, replete with an impressive array of buttons, strange industrial joysticks, and an oddly out of place black dell workstation keyboard with the cord ripped in half. As I made my way up to admire the helm, I nearly tripped on an extension cord, only catching myself on a water filled trashcan with plastic sheeting aspiring to the heavens up through the dark abyss of the half-intact ceiling, which I only now noticed was comprised entirely (if sparsely) of black painted tiles.
Somehow this jolted me out of my entranced state, and I looked for the door I was supposed to find, quickly locating it towards the back of the room, just as I had been told.
Somehow it seemed like not an ordinary door now. It was with great anticipation and not a little trepidation that I examined the door. It was quite ordinary, really, and the knob was less dusty than it might have been. This was encouraging.
I tried the door, and it opened easily. Opened, that is, to a time 30 years in the past.
The buzzing fluorescent lamps were on and radiating furiously, instantly shattering the wreckage of the surveillance spaceship to smithereens. There was a gigantic, wheeled, beige machine in the middle of the room, about the size of an industrial floor scrubber. It hummed patiently, and featured a dim 10 inch green CRT, a beautifully sculpted beige keyboard, and a little less than a quarter inch of dust. I froze like a tourist gaping at a stegosaur’s nose, but quickly recovered my composure as I remembered I was here on purpose.
Conveniently, someone had swept a path through the center of the room, back to the newly installed floor rack with a couple of ciscos, a backup cellular telemetry box, and a pile of screws and a throwaway screwdriver scattered haphazardly on top of one of the routers.
The UPS I was to replace was actually pretty complex to configure, but I very carefully completed it in about 45 minutes including some firmware regressions to accommodate some nonstandard plugin the vendor installed. By very carefully I mean without stepping too hard on the floor, dropping any tools, and afraid to sneeze even though I was under intense respiratory assault from the unavoidable clouds of fine carpet dander that had accumulated on the linoleum tile over years of janitorial malfeasance.
I was terrified to make any sudden moves, because sitting on a stackable plastic chair next to the pliestocene PBX was a beige box. Its fans groaned with the wails of a thousand parched capacitors, and its hard drive made a crunchy rattling sound that seemed entirely improbable for a functioning device. Just visible under the dust on the front was a badge proudly displaying “pentium pro” and a giant cable was fed from the back of the artifact, like an implant from the borg, something I strangely remember as “IBM type 1” token ring wire, though I can’t be sure anymore that means anything at all.
At any rate, it was obvious that the entire on-prem server infrastructure was this ancient and faltering nightmare box, and I knew that a fly landing on it could bring it down. The easy money contract was starting to look like a setup.
With terror in my heart, I finished my work, carefully closed the door, and put as much distance between me and that roiling cauldron of liability as I could. I don’t even remember going back through the wrecked starship, just checking out, and thanking Voltaire that I made it out of there in time.
It now made abundant sense that the job had been left on the board for nearly a month and the contract had kept rising… god only knows how many sensible technicians had noped out of there before I was hypnotized into compliance by the sheer bizarre fascination of the thing.
Poking around afterward, I found that the box apparently was the server that ran the terminals in the tire service area. They also had that fat cable that looked more like waveguide than wire, and it must have been an absolute nightmare to install. It was definitely token ring, humming along in 2019.
Great story! This reminded me of the urban explorer videos taken inside of the last Sears headquarters building. It was (is?) a pretty amazing place and it's somewhat tragic that it was abandoned and left to rot.
> The office had a smell. I can’t say what it was, it was businesslike, and not unpleasant
Timber that was very expensive when it was fitted, and carpet tiles that have repeatedly got damp and not dried out properly. Very old cigarette smoke from when people were allowed to smoke in the office that is now embedded in the blinds and suspended ceiling tiles.
I was recently in a large suite of government offices, fitted out in the 1970s and largely unchanged since, and that was the exact smell. We're imagining the same smell right now.
Stratus ztC Endurance extends fault tolerance to modern enterprise and operational environments with intelligent, predictive technology that prevents failures before they impact operations. Delivering up to *99.99999%* [my emphasis] availability, the platform combines proactive health monitoring, automated failover, redundancy, and simplified serviceability to keep applications continuously available and ensures that data stays protected.
Stratus ztC Endurance is ideal for organizations running mission-critical workloads that cannot tolerate downtime or data loss."
There are airliners that have been in service for over 50 years.
The were Awesome machines - don't let those filthy hobbitsis...err..tandem users cloud your judgement. Stratus was pure hardware FT, and tandem... wasn't :-P
Vos was pretty nice too - decent macro language - not all the utils you expect with a unix box, but in terms of the core OS and shell it was pretty good machine .. 40 years later I still love those machines and the career they helped get me into :-D
A reliable beast - never failed once in the entire time I worked there. Based on PA-RISC if I recall correctly.
Speaking of reliable beasts, I own(ed) a HP PA-RISC workstation that never crashed in six years, and it was even purchased refurbished (second hand, and educational rebate, and still the cost of a car in 1996 - but worth every penny).
I'd add "R.I.P. HP 9000 715/75" but of course she is STILL working now, twenty years later, and she is sitting right next to me (also got a second 715/100XC for spare parts in case on day they are needed).
That's not particularly surprising to be honest. If it's a server operating system, on hardware that doesn't change, there's not really a reason to update the OS unless there's a security problem found
Apparently the latest VOS release was in 2025, which means that somewhere there's a team of developers maintaining it. That's really the thing I find the most interesting, that there exists teams developing operating systems like VOS, strange DOS clones or UnixWare (perhaps less so these days). Must be a strange anonymous life.
I was in Fairbanks visiting family, I had some downtime, so I decided to do some “slumming” to break up the monotony and relive some of the good old days before I was more boardroom than server room.
Besides, a cool grand for what I figured was 2 hours work appealed to me on some “miss the struggles” level, and it was better than walking around the tourist traps or doing video calls at some depressingly fecund coffee shop.
So, I drive up in my borrowed SUV with peeling paint, grab my trusty tool bag I leave with family for adventures like this, and walk boldly through the doors of this apparently normal retail establishment, clipboard in hand. It was 2019, and the smell of denim and factory pressed shirts wafted through my sensorium as I walked through the awkwardly desynchronized automatic doors.
It was a perfectly normal, somewhat 90s nostalgic retail store.., but walking up the stairs (the elevator was out of service) to the second floor, I could just sense that something was a little off.
The office had a smell. I can’t say what it was, it was businesslike, and not unpleasant, but it spoke to me in an unknown language and I was at that moment curiously heartened that my contract was being paid by a 3rd party. It smelled of stagnant ideas, missed opportunities, and a fossilized board of directors.
I’m not just being colorful here in prose. All of these thoughts were projected into my forebrain by some lizard sense I had developed in 40 years of skulking the halls of enterprises large and small. I was involuntarily imagining a half used tin of bengay on the boardroom table, right by the shiny beige speakerphone with the long stroke buttons and the filthy woven grill.
Curious by now about the flood of intuitions, I treaded the slightly dingy burnt orange carpet tiles up to the POC office, checked in, and was shown the door tot the server room. Through there she said, gesturing at a plain flat golden pine door with the elbow thingy at the top. “Through there, straight through, the door at the back. You can’t miss it. I think it’s unlocked.”
Unconcerned with the casual lack of escort (pretty common really), I opened the door and was immediately transported to surreal alternative world. It was dark, there were tens of flickering screens across to the right and one half hanging, flashing fluorescent fixture dangling precariously from the uni-strut above. The suspended ceiling tiles were about 50 percent in attendance.
Fragments littered the floor, and the door closed behind me with a loud thump. for just a moment I was touched by a singular thought….. (run). I shook it off, by now, far too curious to turn back, come what may.
Briefly thinking of my heavy tool bag as a potential weapon, then realizing the ridiculousness of the notion, I let my eyes adjust as I took in the scene with what I confess could only be described as some kind of unhealthy delight.
This was a large room, easily 800 square feet, and a was clearly dedicated to loss prevention surveillance. There was an epic workstation with 2 giant flat screen plasma monitors front and center, and ten smaller monitors on either side. Most of them were dark, and most of the others were flickering with static.a singular monitor had a poor but recognizable image of a small nondescript room with a small desk and two metal chairs, one on each side of the desk in an overtly adversarial position. The image smelled of stale sweat and musty cardboard.
There was seating for two pilots at the helm of this derelict craft, replete with an impressive array of buttons, strange industrial joysticks, and an oddly out of place black dell workstation keyboard with the cord ripped in half. As I made my way up to admire the helm, I nearly tripped on an extension cord, only catching myself on a water filled trashcan with plastic sheeting aspiring to the heavens up through the dark abyss of the half-intact ceiling, which I only now noticed was comprised entirely (if sparsely) of black painted tiles.
Somehow this jolted me out of my entranced state, and I looked for the door I was supposed to find, quickly locating it towards the back of the room, just as I had been told.
Somehow it seemed like not an ordinary door now. It was with great anticipation and not a little trepidation that I examined the door. It was quite ordinary, really, and the knob was less dusty than it might have been. This was encouraging.
I tried the door, and it opened easily. Opened, that is, to a time 30 years in the past.
The buzzing fluorescent lamps were on and radiating furiously, instantly shattering the wreckage of the surveillance spaceship to smithereens. There was a gigantic, wheeled, beige machine in the middle of the room, about the size of an industrial floor scrubber. It hummed patiently, and featured a dim 10 inch green CRT, a beautifully sculpted beige keyboard, and a little less than a quarter inch of dust. I froze like a tourist gaping at a stegosaur’s nose, but quickly recovered my composure as I remembered I was here on purpose.
Conveniently, someone had swept a path through the center of the room, back to the newly installed floor rack with a couple of ciscos, a backup cellular telemetry box, and a pile of screws and a throwaway screwdriver scattered haphazardly on top of one of the routers.
The UPS I was to replace was actually pretty complex to configure, but I very carefully completed it in about 45 minutes including some firmware regressions to accommodate some nonstandard plugin the vendor installed. By very carefully I mean without stepping too hard on the floor, dropping any tools, and afraid to sneeze even though I was under intense respiratory assault from the unavoidable clouds of fine carpet dander that had accumulated on the linoleum tile over years of janitorial malfeasance.
I was terrified to make any sudden moves, because sitting on a stackable plastic chair next to the pliestocene PBX was a beige box. Its fans groaned with the wails of a thousand parched capacitors, and its hard drive made a crunchy rattling sound that seemed entirely improbable for a functioning device. Just visible under the dust on the front was a badge proudly displaying “pentium pro” and a giant cable was fed from the back of the artifact, like an implant from the borg, something I strangely remember as “IBM type 1” token ring wire, though I can’t be sure anymore that means anything at all.
At any rate, it was obvious that the entire on-prem server infrastructure was this ancient and faltering nightmare box, and I knew that a fly landing on it could bring it down. The easy money contract was starting to look like a setup.
With terror in my heart, I finished my work, carefully closed the door, and put as much distance between me and that roiling cauldron of liability as I could. I don’t even remember going back through the wrecked starship, just checking out, and thanking Voltaire that I made it out of there in time.
It now made abundant sense that the job had been left on the board for nearly a month and the contract had kept rising… god only knows how many sensible technicians had noped out of there before I was hypnotized into compliance by the sheer bizarre fascination of the thing.
Poking around afterward, I found that the box apparently was the server that ran the terminals in the tire service area. They also had that fat cable that looked more like waveguide than wire, and it must have been an absolute nightmare to install. It was definitely token ring, humming along in 2019.
Sears closed for good a few months later.
Timber that was very expensive when it was fitted, and carpet tiles that have repeatedly got damp and not dried out properly. Very old cigarette smoke from when people were allowed to smoke in the office that is now embedded in the blinds and suspended ceiling tiles.
I was recently in a large suite of government offices, fitted out in the 1970s and largely unchanged since, and that was the exact smell. We're imagining the same smell right now.
Stratus ztC Endurance extends fault tolerance to modern enterprise and operational environments with intelligent, predictive technology that prevents failures before they impact operations. Delivering up to *99.99999%* [my emphasis] availability, the platform combines proactive health monitoring, automated failover, redundancy, and simplified serviceability to keep applications continuously available and ensures that data stays protected.
Stratus ztC Endurance is ideal for organizations running mission-critical workloads that cannot tolerate downtime or data loss."
Source: https://www.penguinsolutions.com/en-us/solutions/fault-toler...