If you saw my previous post about a professor using Windows 95 (Summary; he was using Windows 95 complaining about software not being compatible), this one takes it to the next level.

Got a call from the engineering department asking if we could go to one of the Electrical Engineering labs and fix one of the computers they used with their oscilloscopes. The EE professor is desperate, says that he called the main IT department and was told they didn’t cover that lab.

The desktops in that lab were only used to view and copy waveforms from the oscilloscopes, and were not networked. The issue was that, since these computers aren’t actually on any of the school’s networks, they don’t belong to either the main IT department or us (research and special faculty support). Instead, the engineering department itself has to service them, but they don’t have the budget, time, or technical staff.

Alarm bells started going off the second I walked in. The first was because all the computers were beige. The second was because they all had CRTs.

Of the five computers, three were running DOS, one was Windows 98, and one was Windows 2000.

The issue was that a student had the brilliant idea to switch a parallel (DB-25) cable with a USB cable, but the OS had no support for hot-plug USB.

After this, I went to every engineering lab and found a total of 13 DOS, 5 Windows 95, 2 Windows 98, 1 Windows 2000, 2 Windows NT, and 4 Sun Solaris (of all things) machines.

We made an agreement that we would give them our old EOL systems (still working systems, we just replace them with newer ones), and in exchange they would install a new operating system and support it properly.

It just boggles my mind, not that they had it, but that none of the Engineering students had complained.

TL,DR; An engineering lab in our school had DOS computers because the computers aren’t supported by any of the schools computer departments.