Legacy Systems Support

We can't quite claim the memory of an elephant, but here at Onega we have been working in IT for many years, and have evolved with the cutting edge at the time. One thing we recognise though is that a shiny new box is not always the answer, and for many reasons systems can remain in place and need supporting for way longer than originally envisaged. These systems may need to be supported and maintained, and Onega staff can thus answer the question of 'how to provide support for critical legacy production systems?'

Examples we've seen vary from large bespoke systems which run highly specialised applications, through to systems that were 'of their time' such as the diagnostics that integrate with aircraft and automotive control and diagnostics electronics. Often these require interfaces like RS232 or custom ports that are no longer supported on new computers, or only running on older and now obsolete operating systems.

We pride ourselves in fundamental understanding and broad experience, so if your company still runs systems using CP/M , MS-DOS , Windows 3.1, Windows 3.11, OS/2, Windows NT Server, Linux / Unix , older Apple systems, Intel 8086, 80186. 80286, 80386, 80486, Pentium, Pentium Pro, AMD / Cyrix etc. RS232, Interfaced etc. then fret not - we may well be able to help.

Older software built with Visual Basic / dbase applications / FoxPro / Lotus-123 / Lotus Notes / DTP & Graphics Apps are also in our experience.

We follow a common sense approach and will typically be able to provide a sense check as to what the best approach is going forward. For a number of applications (like some large format CAD printer drivers) where there was only expensive custom software available before no longer produced, there might be an open source or equivalent low cost alternative which can shortcut creation of a solution. For many custom applications that would have been developed in the past at great expense - correctly at the time because there would have been no other option; these days there may well be a readily available alternative solution that could be put in place.

Some older technology interfaces have been hybridised to new tech, so where current state of the art in business hard drive storage might be SATA SSD disks, SSDs can also be interfaced to IDE to give older systems a reliability and speed boost to see some extra years through. If you do run with 5 1/4 inch hard sectored floppy drives, or 8" floppies on your older systems and need support then please do give us a call and we'll be very happy to see what we can do to help - especially if we need to go 7 stories underground to get to the computer system in question.