We will probably have to update some software this spring/summer and the IDE only works on Win98. Whenever we have to do this (every five years or so) we cross our fingers and pray the last remaining machine boots up. Now I know who to contact if this time it doesn’t boot. 
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Nothing quite like working for a company that relies on a 20 year old operating system. Might as well hang a sign on your network that says “Hackers Welcome.”
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Unless you go older, in which case they don’t have tools. Work on an old school PDP-11 or we have some software that still runs a core PDP-8 (that’s 12-bit) inside a tiny emulator since the code was deployed in 1969, and to debug is painful as it is an NP complete problem to do unit testing, and requires 7000! (the ! is factorial not emphasis) iterations through the b-tree to determine if it works… So emulators are easier to verify than this ancient code. Someone could, but they’d have to start from scratch. Just like those missile launch systems which still run on 8" floppies; no virus on those things…
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It’s only powered up a couple times a decade and the network it’s on is an old one we keep around for pretty much it. We have machines in the production area that still have MS-DOS computers connected to them. Again, not on the network.
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Until somebody finds a way to Stuxnet 'em.
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Just make sure they’ve been patched against the Morris worm.
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I get your point - nuclear weapons, should really be safe. But the Stuxnet writers appeared to have their own machines to explore and find vulnerabilities. It would seem unlikely any black hats have an old missile command and control system to poke and prod.
On the other hand, you never know what the US govt has tossed on the ol’ surplus pile.
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I have an old Tektronix logic analyser that still runs Win98. It originally cost more than £20K. I wanted to post a trace from it on GitHub a while ago and since I don’t have any machines with 3.5" floppies anymore I decided the easiest way to get data off it was to plug a USB drive into it. To my surprise I found Win98 didn’t come with support for mass storage devices by default, so I had to find an ancient download that added it. I can’t remember how I got it onto the machine. I think I must have used a serial port.
I don’t know if I will ever use it again as it has a very wide but not very deep trace buffer. I don’t work on anything with wide external busses these days, so narrower and much deeper is more useful.
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We have an old logic analyzer we call the aircraft carrier. We don’t use it much. I know its nickname and that it doesn’t require an external computer and there my knowledge of it ends.
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Ha, we used to have one where I worked that we wheeled around on a trolley and referred to it as the machine that goes “ping”.
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Welp! Ya never know what ya might find out there…
PINGG!
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A friend and myself explored an old minute man silo a few miles east of Denver. Quite a complex down there.
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