This guys ^&*% attitude is nothing new, in fact I wonder if he's maybe an accountant instead of an automation guy.
We have five old S5 systems at my plant (plant is only 15 years old, so we probably got the last batch of machines with these!). Previous systems engineer also put it in the too hard basket and we have a box of spares bought off E-bay from several years ago as the only contingency. I have no idea if any of them even work, I've only been there just over a year and I'm not game enough to swap out cards to see what happens!
After spending a week translating the old dot-matrix printout of the program from german to english and figuring out how the machine works, I put a budget request forward of $200k to do the 4 machines, and another 60k the next year for the "master" of this system (4 x turbo compressors with a central controller).
The accountants were horrified, and offered me $40k (i.e. not even enough to do 1 properly). Out of interest, I asked Siemens (their compressor package) to price up the same job. Cost was over $650k, which was to be expected when you've got to fly a couple of engineers out from Germany for several weeks.
So now I sit, and almost hope that one dies. I'll be ringing the accountant if it does and ask him how he proposes to operate the machine manually 24/7 while I get a panel built, which will of course take several weeks at best.
Penny smart, Pound foolish.