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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

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