Not OP, but I've worked on lots of 20-50 year old CNC machines, and have done controls for press brakes and resistance welders that are more than 100 years in age (granted, the PLCs and PCs were added later to streamline the relay logic created around World War 1, but the cast iron and motion works date to that era). Two weeks ago I fixed up an RS232 DNC pipeline for a 1985 mill, the source code manuals were heavily yellowed but I eventually figured out the now-esoteric RS232 configuration. One of my coworkers worked on this equipment a bit more than a decade ago, but the newest part - a Windows 7 PC - was the first thing to break.
The addage "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" comes with the corollary that if you build it right it won't break...until it does. And then someone has to do some archaeology to get a process back online that hasn't been documented since dot-matrix printers and typewriters, much less git development. I'm also building stuff and making decisions today for machines that have 10, 20, or 30-year expected lifetimes, and the core components should last indefinitely as long as maintenance is performed.
Many businesses aren't built for and aren't compatible with a 2- or 3-year obsolescence cycle.
The addage "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" comes with the corollary that if you build it right it won't break...until it does. And then someone has to do some archaeology to get a process back online that hasn't been documented since dot-matrix printers and typewriters, much less git development. I'm also building stuff and making decisions today for machines that have 10, 20, or 30-year expected lifetimes, and the core components should last indefinitely as long as maintenance is performed.
Many businesses aren't built for and aren't compatible with a 2- or 3-year obsolescence cycle.