What eldritch horror lurks behind Heathrow's information screens?

Airport departure boards are supposed to tell passengers where and when their flights will leave. Recent examples spotted by eagle-eyed Reg readers have offered some bonus information: a Windows activation reminder, dates from the past, and a glimpse of what appears to be Windows 7 beneath the signage software.

Airport borks, it seems, are like buses: three have arrived in quick succession at Heathrow.

The first display shows a Windows activation watermark behind a list of departures to glamorous destinations. Milan? How lovely. Cairo? A place to ponder culture and millennia-old construction techniques. Activate Windows? OK, not quite so lovely. Perhaps the destination board had simply embarked on a journey of self-discovery. But at least the date was correct, right? Er, wrong.

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Time might be moving forward for the rest of the world, but at Heathrow it appears to be going backward. Perhaps heading to a time when air traffic control wasn't beset by problems and air travel didn't involve increasingly performative security protocols that differ country by country. Our second serving of signage silage shows one page dated September 21 and another stuck on September 12. A number switcheroo? A window into the past? Or simply a display that had stopped receiving updates?

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Alas, things became more unsettling a few days later when another Heathrow screen revealed the eldritch horror lurking beneath the departures display. Is that... Windows 7? The network dialog looks an awful lot like something from the operating system that refuses to die. The taskbar and Start button peeking out from the bottom of the screen only deepen the suspicion.

Then again, Heathrow is no stranger to displaying retired technology. A British Airways Concorde remains parked at the airport, reminding passengers stuffed into yet another Boeing or Airbus that air travel was once considerably more ambitious – and perhaps a little more dangerous.

When Concorde retired in 2003, Microsoft was two years into the Windows XP era. A different sort of danger, perhaps, but at least nobody had yet asked it to run an airport departures board in 2026. ®