One simple truth that test and automation engineers know well is that technology is always changing and advancing. Even the most state-of-the-art system today will be obsolete tomorrow. Obsolescence is caused by a number of factors, but regardless of the cause, if you don’t closely support your system, it will eventually become outdated and it will need to be updated.
Old systems often stick around for a reason. Since they’ve been around for a while, everyone knows how to use them. They know the quirks, they know how to set it up, and if something goes wrong someone has likely seen it before and knows what to do about it. After years of using the same system it can be difficult to see the benefits of an intense and costly upgrade.
The most common way to replace hardware is to follow the intuitive first step--check the specifications of the hardware that needs to be replaced and look for hardware that most closely matches. The problem with this method is that systems most often need an update due to the hardware being out of date or nearing obsolescence.
I once had a customer ask me for a National Instruments DIO module to replace one that had gone bad. The problem was that the module had not been in production for over 10 years. It was an ISA bus module. I didn't even really know what ISA was. This system was old and had been working correctly, so no updates had been made. If it ain't broke then don't fix it. The problem is they were unable to fix it when it did break. Because they had to completely start over, there was a high cost to recreate the test system.
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