HI I'm brand new here to the forum.
I am a seasoned computer network server and systems IT guy self employed.
I have a small number of clients here in Michigan that are using these old mills in full time production.
I'm not sure if the reasoning behind this is that they are just great machines (for the money) or if it's cost or reliability or if they are considered still supported and serviceable.

Please keep in mind I am not a CNC or shop guy so a lot of this is new to me even though I have been supporting these companies for well over 15 years now.

I'm in the process of trying to make a better effort to be on top of this old stuff as it's not going to run forever.
One common theme to all of these older machines is that they are running older 20 + year old computers running windows 95 an windows 98.
They are getting really hard to support and get parts for.
I'm curious if this is common or if many of you may have moved or adapted these to work with much newer computer systems?

I'm pretty comfortable supporting the old stuff DOS Windows 3.11 Windows 95 and Windows 98.

But finding older single board ISA Pentium100s 486s and ISA RS422 can really be a pain.

Looking for pointers and ideas on what you may have done or are doing to keep these older computers running on these reliably.
But possible with newer up to date hardware.

As I dig into this further I'll likely become more and more familiar with the machines themselves and the software they are using to run them.

I've had the first motherboard fail in the 15 years I have been working with these and never really had to dig in deeply as to how these work and what software they work with and what it will run on.
My clients have always had "mill companies" deal with this but now they are asking me to get involved more.