Even today, my physics lab has multiple computers running Windows XP or 2000. It's the easiest way to keep running old and sometimes proprietary software. We keep them off the network, of course.
(Coincidentally, our work overlaps with John Goodenough's. He's a legend, and impressively prolific even in old age.)
It's not just the software, it's also the instruments themselves.
The most worthwhile function of Windows turns out to be its backward compatibility.
This became most apparent after Microsoft leveraged their software engineering leadership by pivoting into an anti-recycling company to make most of their money.
There are incredible numbers of irreplaceable laboratory instruments made years ago which depend completely on the version of Windows that was "supported" when the instrument was issued.
Since Microsoft has failed at their truly most worthwhile function, it is now necessary to put incredible effort into preserving older versions of Windows and even more difficult to preserve the older PC's. These cheap office machines, which were built to spend as little useful time as possible before progressing into their primary target duty as landfill, as electronics go were built especially crummy, just for you.
Anyway, I'll be restoring a mass spectrometer shortly to operate as designed on Windows 3.1.
Yes, it will cost a few thousand for the PC effort alone, but we're not going to spend 100x that amount to get a new(er) spectrometer just so it will operate using a more modern Windows version like XP or W7.
There is also a great possibility that a brand new instrument compatible with Windows 10 will be completely useless in less than 20 years due to this Windows deficiency alone.
I noticed that too. Also expected 'but we keep them off the net and it's secret software and we cannot change things' posts. I wonder when history will stop repeating itself.
It's not that we can't change things, is that doing so sometimes costs $10s of thousands of dollars. We often have instruments running on XP, that work completely fine, but the software will not run on 7, 8, or 10. When we contact the company to ask about an update they say "sure, but you'll need a software maintenance contract, with a re-certification fee, etc. etc, for $40k." No faculty member wants to pay $40k to move something working to a new OS when we can put it on our unrouted internal network and keep it running on XP for $0.
