A German railway firm posted an eye-catching job opening online. The job description sought an administrator with knowledge of MS-DOS and Windows 3.11. MS-DOS is one of the first consumer device operating systems and was released in 1975.
In general, not much seems to have changed about the digital infrastructure of the railroads since their arrival. A job posting from the German railway firm shows that. Specifically, the candidate is expected to have knowledge of MS-DOS and Windows 3.11.
To have knowledge of these operating systems, the suitable candidate will have many years of life experience to bring to the table. After all, MS-DOS was introduced in 1975, while Windows 3.11 saw the light of day in 1993.
1 task at a time, 8MB RAM
So, the digital infrastructure of the German railway firm also seems to be quite old. For example, MS-DOS is only suitable for running one program at a time. Now, we easily run four programs simultaneously on our laptops during a working day. Further specifications indicate that the systems run on 166MHz processors and have only 8MB of RAM memory.
The job posting is reportedly now offline. One X user, however, found the job posting noteworthy enough to share a screenshot of its contents. The user knows that the underlying company maintains displays at stations for almost all of Germany.
Old systems popular in critical organizations
A country’s critical infrastructure, by the way, appears to run on outdated operating systems more often than not. Late last year, a study showed that many Dutch hospitals were still running their digital infrastructure on Windows XP.
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