Ask HN: Who's still keeping a DOS machine up because the business depends on it?
I'm not trying to sell anything, just doing some research for an idea around keeping these going on modern hardware.
- ▪I'm not trying to sell anything, just doing some research for an idea around keeping these going on modern hardware.
Hacker News (Front Page) files mainly under programming. We currently carry 2,163 of its stories. Top-voted stories on Hacker News.
Story provenance
Source · retrieval · rights · ranking — open for full record
inspect →
Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | Ycombinator |
| Canonical URL | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49848955 |
| Publication time | Fri, 25 Sep 2026 19:37:55 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-09-25T22:35:25.651Z |
| Last seen | 2026-09-25T22:35:25.651Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | 2u5dVoUpfY1c · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Do you currently work with or know anyone who is still using:* dBase/Clipper/CLARION/Paradox/other DOS RAD environments on period hardware to run business processes?* CNC mills/spectrometers/microscopes/other industrial instruments controlled by ISA cards (either bespoke or standards like GPIB)?* Anything with a parallel port dongle?If so, I'd be very interested in hearing your experience here, or feel free to send me an email at the address in my profile. I'm not trying to sell anything, just doing some research for an idea around keeping these going on modern hardware.
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Ycombinator.