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A comment on IRS’ 60-Year-Old IT System Failed on Tax Day Due to New Hardware. Parent comment

Re:IRS’ 60-Year-Old IT System Failed on Tax Day Due to New H... by DonaldFisk on Monday April 30, 2018 @08:13PM (#16963659)
If the hardware is unsupported and no longer maintainable you could run the software on an emulator. That way you don't need to know how the software works. The hardware's instruction set would be a lot less complex and almost certainly better documented.
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Re:IRS’ 60-Year-Old IT System Failed on Tax Day Due to New H... by tonyarkles on Monday April 30, 2018 @08:22PM (#16963698)
Whenever this comes up, I’m reminded of two of my favourite calculators: the HP48 and the HP49g+. HP used a processor called the Saturn for a long time, and when they finally could no longer source it, they switched to ARM running a Saturn emulator for the ‘49. The ‘48 had battle-hardened firmware, and this was probably a great decision.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP_Saturn

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