"Roland Perry" wrote in message ...

The display in question is at least 100 cable-ft from somewhere you might
put a computer, if not inside the back of the display. In any event, given
how new and shiny the place is, why install six year old computers in the
back office.

I don't know about this installation, but what is basically a pc on the back
of the monitor is quite common, mainly because a simple copper Ethernet
connection can go 100 m from a network switch, and the source of the data
can be another 100 m away from the switch in a different direction, whereas
VGA, DVI, HDMI, Displayport etc. are generally limited to much shorter
distances without special hardware at each end of the link.

A few years ago I was at terminal C at Newark airport. They had recently
installed lots of nice Samsung flatscreen displays since my previous visit,
but they were being driven by actual PCs behind them, Dell if I remember
correctly, rather than a purpose built device mounted on each monitor.
They looked like old ones which had been used with the previous displays.

We have some tills at work which run Windows 2000, which certainly wasn't
the current version when they were new, and things like cash machines and
supermarket checkouts often run old versions of software. I saw a cash
machine a few years ago which was running OS/2. I suppose the old version
has been tested and proven to work, and if it's not broken don't fix it.
These sort of applications seldom need features which weren't available in
the older versions, and in the case of PIDs even security patches probably
wouldn't be needed.