Apparently, employers are still asking for Windows 95 and Windows 3.1 skills

Re:Apparently, employers are still asking for Windows 95 and... by NathanKP on Friday June 25, 2010 @11:46PM (#1463042)

Windows 95 is still used extensively in embedded programming due to the unparalleled direct hardware access that it provides. When you are developing code for devices that use 8086, or even older FPGA's, you don't need the latest OS. In fact, the newer versions of Windows have more security and device layers which block the operation of the older programs used for uploading code to those older microprocessors.

As a result, some of the old chipsets can only be programmed using old software which only works on 95. For a business that does embedded programming it isn't feasible to switch to a new chipset that would require a complete code rewrite just so that they can use a newer OS.

Interestingly embedded programming is also an extremely high paying job because there aren't that many people who can do it.

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Re:Apparently, employers are still asking for Windows 95 and... by heyjonboy on Saturday June 26, 2010 @12:19AM (#1463091)

Why wouldn't you just use Linux for embedded systems? Seems wasteful to use a GUI-based OS for something that will most likely be a single-purpose device.

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Re:Apparently, employers are still asking for Windows 95 and... by mahmud on Saturday June 26, 2010 @01:36AM (#1463189)

Toolchain and development cycle. Windows 95 systems programming is trivial, and not in a good way. You can access privileged system registers and memory areas directly, until you crash your box. Once you learn how to write a VxD it's a matter of tweaking it for other purposes, since the great difficulty lies in just getting the skeleton to work.

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Re:Apparently, employers are still asking for Windows 95 and... by nitrogen on Saturday June 26, 2010 @02:51AM (#1463273)

Linux is mostly that easy, in my experience. It may be easier, since there are probably already drivers for most of your chips. At any rate, once you have a skeleton kernel mode driver, it's just a matter of tweaking it for other purposes.

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