Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by janrinok on Monday September 26 2016, @12:35AM   Printer-friendly

If you want to find all the oldest computer in government, then you might as well just wait until government up and decides to find them all itself. So congratulations everybody, we found all of them! Well, the Government Accountability Office did.

Since the start of my project, one of my goals has been to find repeatable language for getting information about computer inventories from agencies. This report contains one very helpful step towards that goal: it brought the Clinger-Cohen Act of 1996 to my attention.

[...] One of this report's key findings was that of all the money the Federal Government spends on their information systems, about 75% of that is spent on operations and maintenance (O&M) alone, with "5,233 of the government's approximately 7,000 IT investments [...] spending all of their funds on O&M activities." This means that there's less funding available for new investments or upgrades to existing ones. Instead, we're just spending all of our time making sure that what we already have works.

Also, the age of an investment isn't determined by hardware alone: neglecting software upgrades can also hold back the age of an investment. For this reason, the Department of Treasury's master tax record system is stuck in the mid–60's. While they've upgraded the hardware to more modern IBM mainframes, those mainframes are still running vintage assembly. When considering systems investments, this makes the Treasury's the oldest in the Federal government.

So, mission accomplished, right? We found the oldest computer! And it's the computers inside the IRS that makes sure everybody is paying their taxes! The Simpsons did it!

We did indeed find the oldest computer in government, but it's not really a computer at all; it's computer software. In some ways that's satisfying: old software needs just as much maintenance, expertise, and money to keep it running the machines correctly. It's also what's most exploitable, even if exploits written against custom assembly are unlikely. Anyway, the hardware can't run without the software. If this is the oldest hardware, then the machines running the nuclear defense system are the clear winners of the "oldest computer prize."

However, there remains a lot more research to be done. In particular, I'm starting to have a lot of questions about this tax software and the management around it. Why's it not been updated? Is anybody inside Treasury advocating for it to be updated? Does anyone care? What are the consequences of catastrophic systems failure within the IRS? And the perennial computing question: have they made backups?

This report also only covers the federal government. We have 50 states, some with HVAC systems run by Amigas.


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 2) by jelizondo on Monday September 26 2016, @05:45AM

    by jelizondo (653) Subscriber Badge on Monday September 26 2016, @05:45AM (#406545) Journal

    I agree with you but sometimes getting new hardware makes life horrible for the people that have to support old software.

    More than 20 years ago I wrote I piece of software for a company and it was running, last I checked, until last year. It is at the same time my greatest pride (Been running for 20 years!) and shame (why the hell haven’t they got around re-writing it?).

    At the time I used some direct assembly to talk to the network adapter, which then seemed like a good idea to make the software faster but has been a source of hardship to the people having to support it over the years.

    For reasons not entirely known to me, the company has been unwilling to have the software rewritten and the support people have to resort to trying to make the old network adapter work on a new PC or entirely giving up and continue to use an old PC until it croaks, some time later, and then it becomes someone else's problem.

    Writing a piece of software is like having children, you can not anticipate how they´ll turn out or where they’ll end up.

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   2