I have the feeling that in the past this wasn’t so unusual, particularly as there was less security patches and more airgapped systems that didn’t need rebooting. I remember being in airports, government offices, large corporate field offices and the like, and these machines that have huge uptimes would have BSD, SCO unix, HP-UX, DEC alpha and similar installed and almost never Windows or Linux.

I still use a BSD variant or Solaris clone when I want something super reliable, but now with Linux I am doing an experiment for a system I want around for 10+ years (I do have experience with Linux almost since its release, just think its something I have to handhold more).

I also like in the article the engineer talking with the customer about the reliability of the hardware - I guess the customer was proven right or just lucky for once!