For Old Parts, NASA Boldly Goes . . . on eBay
By WILLIAM J. BROAD

NASA needs parts no one makes anymore.

So to keep the shuttles flying, the space agency has begun trolling the Internet — including Yahoo and eBay — to find replacement parts for electronic gear that would strike a home computer user as primitive.

Officials say the agency recently bought a load of outdated medical equipment so it could scavenge Intel 8086 chips — a variant of those chips powered I.B.M.'s first personal computer, in 1981.

When the first shuttle roared into space that year, the 8086 played a critical role, at the heart of diagnostic equipment that made sure the shuttle's twin booster rockets were safe for blastoff.
Source

I would think that they could upgrade different parts of the system and still keep it going. We can network a 386 running DOS with a Windows XP machine. Why can they mix hardware?

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Dennis
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