Texas Company's Antique Computers Are For Production, Not Display 289
concealment writes "Sparkler Filters up north in Conroe [Texas] still uses an IBM 402 in conjunction with a Model 129 key punch – with the punch cards and all – to do company accounting work and inventory. The company makes industrial filters for chemical plants and grease traps. Lutricia Wood is the head accountant at Sparkler and the data processing manager. She went to business school over 40 years ago in Houston, and started at Sparkler in 1973. Back then punch cards were still somewhat state of the art."
See kottke.org for an eye-popping view of one of the "programs" — imagine debugging that.
Debugging that... (Score:5, Insightful)
"THAT", (a wired board), is vastly easier to debug than any modern software. In fact a trainee can usually debug it by trial an error in just a few minutes.
Now get off my digital lawn whipersnapper!
Re:Debugging that... (Score:4, Funny)
It's not old, it's hacker resistant :D
Re:Debugging that... (Score:5, Funny)
Not if you're hacking with a box cutter.
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Awesome... I better head over to the http://www.livingcomputermuseum.org/ [livingcomputermuseum.org] this weekend and brush up on my skills
I find it difficult to believe in your sorrow. (Score:3, Funny)
http://xkcd.com/385/ [xkcd.com]
Trust me on this, wiring skill isn't normally supposed to depend on possession of a pale pink penis. You're totally doing it wrong.
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Why would you even bring in race when it has nothing to do with the discussion? Somehow I doubt you were "sorry to say" it, especially given the rant below.
He apparently had to say something, didn't he? If he said just "they were girls", you'd pull the sexism card instead. Was he supposed to say "the worst contender was a person"? That would have been a tautology. Most likely he didn't know the majority of those people personally (my experience from college as well), and when you observe someone unfamiliar doing something and you want to say something about them specifically, there is but a small number of immediately observable traits you notice even from dis
Re:Debugging that... (Score:5, Interesting)
The day of the trial came. The teacher came in with a big battery and a pair of earphones. First they tested all the techie boys. They had nicely arranged boards. Many of them had actually done some electronics work at home. Some of their kit worked; some didn't. There were only about 7 of them. They drifted out of the room.
The teacher hooked me up -- and mine actually worked! A surprise to all of us. I had never soldered anything before, and had biked around town assembling the collection of parts that I had looked up in a book somewhere.
The point of this is that those of us with no engineering background whatever can be relied on to do something weird when first confronted with it. Not that those young women were really qualified; that is another issue. But big loops of wire? I can relate to that!
Re:Debugging that... (Score:4, Insightful)
No, it doesn't. Leaving that meme tied up in the basement would be doing everyone a favor.
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You know, it might just be that those people that took 4 hours just aren't good at running wires. It might not have had anything to do at all with the fact that they were black or women.
The fact that you assert that there is a causal link with no evidence pretty much defines you as a racist misogynist. Did you have access to those particular students SAT scores? Have you assessed their high school transcripts? Did you compare their performance with any other students performance, other than your own? Sounds
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Pro tip: if you have to assure your readership that you are not racist, not once, not twice, but three times in the course of your post, that's generally not a good sign.
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Hey, it's the original spaghetti code!
The manager's moto (Score:5, Insightful)
"If it ain't broke, don't replace it. Even if replacing it would lead to a 3 fold increase in employee productivity."
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I have seen those kinds of productivity increase numbers thrown around for years, but honestly I have never see a good result. Usually the new system is slower.
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I have seen those kinds of productivity increase numbers thrown around for years, but honestly I have never see a good result. Usually the new system is slower.
I was going to say something similar, you usually end up exchanging the problems and limitations of the old system for a the problems and limitations of the new system which is rarely faster and usually requires even more maintenance. Very rarely does the TCO savings, if any, match the cost of implementing the new system.
That said, sometimes you have to just bite the bullet.
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Re:The manager's moto (Score:5, Interesting)
That's because the new system is frequently implemented in the latest version of a one-size-fits-all, Three-Letter-Acronym, popular technology of the day. And that's because the implementers are obsessed with flexing their technological prowess, instead of solving the business problem. I know a guy who would start by insisting this company should replace this thing with a Grails / Hadoop based solution. Why? Because he's a Grails and Hadoop fanboy, not because they have anything to do with this business' needs. When all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like Michaelangelo's Pieta [wikipedia.org].
The bigger question is if this could be replaced with a "faster" system. It probably could, but you have to consider the entire manufacturing and accounting processes it handles. Do they punch the cards and include them with the job? Do workers write notes on the punch cards before returning them? How would all those activities be replaced? There are tons of further things to consider, like a shop floor is a notoriously dirty environment. Labels might be tough because adhesives won't stick due to oil on the work products. A beeping scanner might not work if the employees wear hearing protection. And no matter what, if you have to retrain your employees to do a process differently, there will be a temporary slowdown due to the learning curve.
On the plus side, if you are honestly looking at your business process with an eye to changing the automation, you can probably find places where the new automation would help you to eliminate waste. Do the shop guys measure things with a dial caliper and write them down? Plug in a data collecting caliper and skip the pencils. Do the guys have to move a job sheet from bin to bin as they do their work? RFID tags on the bins could eliminate the handling of the job sheet. Can a new scheduling program help you find the more profitable jobs, or the faster paying customers, and move them to the front of the queue when cashflow is tight?
There's likely a lot of things they could improve with automation, but any of them would involve a lot of change, and many people are uncomfortable with that much change.
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"If it ain't broke, don't replace it unless you can't fix it when it does break. Then you should work on replacing it as soon as possible. Even if replacing it would lead to a 3 fold increase in employee productivity."
TFTFY
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They are slowly migrating to using PCs according to article. They turned down offers to buy the machine from the Computer History Museum, so they must be using it or else have a lot of nostalgia for it (a perfectly valid reason to keep it).
There's not a lot of details on what exactly they use the machine for. But I suspect they keep it because the current process is working. Punch in numbers, put the cards on file, later gather up groups of cards and run them through the machine to do some simple arithme
I used to write programs in PL1/PLC on punch cards (Score:4, Interesting)
at Florida Technological University (now called UCF). I remember a few instances of seeing people trip or drop stacks or boxes of cards on the floor and then crying when they had try to reorder them to get their program to work.
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Re:I used to write programs in PL1/PLC on punch ca (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:I used to write programs in PL1/PLC on punch ca (Score:4, Funny)
Thanks. That would have been real helpful 40 YEARS AGO!
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True. But you have to admit, much COBOL was stored on and run from 80-column or maybe IBM 96-column) cards. Boxes and boxes of them, given the amazingly low code density (i.e., verbosity) of the language.
I would venture here and now in the 21st Century COBOL is safely away from punched cards. However, my Air Force computer programming curriculum 30 years ago was 4 weeks (out of a 6-week class) of COBOL punched onto cards and run in batch mode. Rubber bands and the designated runner of the day to take the d
Re:I used to write programs in PL1/PLC on punch ca (Score:4, Interesting)
I had a very annoying related bug in a mainframe program once that took me forever to get to the bottom of, where a text parser I had written was getting the weirdest errors. Eventually I discovered that somewhere in between the input text file on disk and my program was a virtual card punch and virtual card reader - each line of text went through as a virtual punch card for legacy reasons - and the virtual card punch was being ever-so-helpful and automatically punching sequence numbers in 73-80!
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That's why smart people punched sequence numbers in columns 73-80. It helped if you had access to a card sorter, otherwise you'd incur machine time using the sort program to punch a new deck.
There was a lot of standalone electromechanical hardware (not just punches and sorters) to support punched card data processing - my mother (now 80) worked for a utility company in the 50s and alternated her time between doing data entry (card punch) and data verification - essentially retyping the data on a card verifi
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Yeah, BINDERE DUNDAT.
c. 1977, cutting my teath on "real programming" in Fortran, and CDC 6600 Assembler with punched cards (post HP2000 Basic -- everyone starts with Basic - in high school). We did have a few plugboard computers, including at least one analog computer, as well.
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seeing people trip or drop stacks or boxes of cards on the floor and then crying
Grab a marker pen and draw some diagonal lines/crosses on the edges of the stack. You can easily see which ones are out of order.
You can also see if anybody has swapped a couple of them around as a "joke".
Re:I used to write programs in PL1/PLC on punch ca (Score:4, Interesting)
The key to the whole thing was the rubber banded few cards at the front of the box that ran IEHSORT(?) on the sequence numbers of the rest of the box.
And I thought I was all "1337" (Score:3)
How much power does that beast consume? (Score:3)
And now long would you have to run it to spend the same amount of money it takes to buy modern equipment and pay for someone to convert your accounting over?
I like "if it ain't broke" in general, but this thing has to be a massive power drain, and when it finally does break, they're likely going to be screwed.
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I think the "when it finally breaks" issue is probably of bigger importance than the power draw. Generally (and what others in this thread have already alluded to), a conversion may be far more complex/time consuming than we might think. Future functionality is one thing, but migrating old data to a new system can sometimes be very difficult, especially for something as important as accounting. And you usually need someone with intimate knowledge of the legacy system, which can require massive reverse-engin
Re:How much power does that beast consume? (Score:4, Insightful)
And what happens when the lady that's running this system dies of a heart attack and the only people that even know how to use one of these computers are all retired and senile?
It's not just the machine costs, the retraining. It's what happens if the only person who truly understands the system gets hit by a bus. The hit by a bus scenario is often overlooked in small businesses. You don't just need to be able to replace the system and hardware, you need to be able to replace the people running it, without advance notice.
I still use punch cards ... (Score:5, Funny)
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In a class on numerical analysis and computing we used Fortran for the programming homework. One of my friends decided he wanted to do the entire thing using punch cards. The rest of us laughed at him because the computer center had all these modern CRT terminals. But he would go into the side room with the punch machine and use that while the rest of us called him crazy. Then at the end of the school year there was a big queue to use the terminals from every class at the university that had a programmi
It's not broken, so let's break it (SAP). (Score:5, Interesting)
Company where I worked decided there perfectly fine AS/400 systems were not good enough and would save lots of money replacing the 20 year old system with SAP.
Hilarity ensued.
(and lots of 70 hour weeks... only 5% implemented with 15 years worth of projected savings already spent).
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SAP has been known to bring down companies, do to poor IT management, they try to use the system to replace the existing ones, vs. changing the organization to work with the new system.
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I can remember when "everyone is implementing SAP, no one has implemented SAP". As much as peoplesoft blows goats (and it blows a great many goats indeed), you can see why it took off.
Just one question...WHY?? (Score:3)
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To be more realistic, the guy who operates that machine will be retiring in a few years, the people who are willing and able to work it want to be paid premium bucks, also have a tenancy of having a huge ego problem that makes them difficult to work with. The new system is easier to find guys who can do the work, and they will be more willing to work with you.
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Is this an old story? (Score:4, Informative)
I thought the Computer History Museum got that IBM 402. There's one in the Computer History Museum now. They may have the machine the company was using for parts.
Here it is running in Conroe, TX [youtube.com] in 2011. (Terrible video, though)
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Most of those "parts" in that photo can be purchased at a hardware store!
Wow (Score:5, Funny)
And people bitch about XP users hanging onto an old and obsolete system.
no harder than debugging wire-wrap circuits (Score:2)
I took an embedded systems course in university (Engineering Physics program)....we had to build boards up from components, write software in assembly, and then load it into the hardware and cause the hardware to do stuff.
My longest debug session was when I couldn't figure out why my software wasn't working properly...turned out that my team-mates had mis-wired the stepper motor. Once I figured out exactly how they had screwed up the wiring I was able to compensate in software and it worked perfectly.
026 (Score:5, Informative)
I've lost track of the software... (Score:5, Interesting)
Someone should be fired (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Someone should be fired (Score:4, Informative)
That may be part of it, but generally an overhaul of an entire system like that, especially something as integral to a business as accounting, isn't a decision any single person can make. Also, it's possible those who would've had job security by maintaining that system have long since retired. Slow-moving business isn't completely built on nefarious intentions.
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Well for a very high level (CEO) explanation, the money it will take to replace this system now is money that was stolen over the years from the company in the form of larger profits instead of investment.
Re:Someone should be fired (Score:5, Interesting)
I would love to see what they have spent on maintenance over the years for that electromechanical junk.
I would love to see what they've saved on not having a bunch of programmers wondering why the latest Java update broke everything.
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And, of course, there is no really useable backup of all of the company's data for when the inevitable final failure hits
You mean, other than all the punch cards? You can use your smart phone camera as a punch card reader these days - there's an app for that.
Also, since essentially all paper in the US comes from tree farms, and since that land would be used for farming something other than trees without the demand for paper, I'd say wasting paper is a sign that one likes trees.
Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
Re:So i wonder how this was discovered? (Score:5, Funny)
And...
He picked it up and threw it into the trash.
When I wrote it up, nobody wanted to believe me.
Re:So i wonder how this was discovered? (Score:5, Funny)
It's funny how those things persist. Years ago, I took over a mainframe data processing department. Every month I would be sent a fan-fold report on that old school tractor fed paper that took up a whole copy paper box. It literally was a 50 pound report. I had no idea what it was for, nor did anyone else. It went straight into the shredder. Every month a new bundle would show up. I sent it straight to the shredder. Didn't even look at it. The box came interoffice mail with no return address and there wasn't any identifying information on the report for me to figure out where it came from or how to get it shut off. Not even a report identifier I could look for in the mainframe. I can't imagine how much time, paper, and impact printer ribbon went into it. I mean, how would you even look for anything on that report? Kept coming every month for the whole 4 years I managed that department. I hear it finally and mysteriously, stopped showing up a year or two ago. The new manager has no explanation for it's demise but it was a good thing. /Shrug
Re:So i wonder how this was discovered? (Score:4, Informative)
I can't seem to find a way to undo/change my moderation.
So I guess I'll do this, instead
Replacing operator (Score:2)
Replacing this dated equipment will also result in replacing operator, and that can have all kinds of hidden costs. If someone worked for your business for 40 years and is loyal and productive employee, then why do you care if they want to do it with punch cards or abacus? They had 40 years to prove that whatever they are doing works, unless there are new process requirements, there is no reason to change
Decision chart:
1. Did any processes change or about to change? Yes/No
Yes - Go To 3.
No - Go To 2.
2. Job
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One vacuum tube away from disaster (Score:4, Insightful)
One critical irreplaceable part breaks, and they can no longer process payroll or inventory.
All because they don't want to hire somebody to spend a week or two to replace the functionality of that obscene waste of energy with a simple spreadsheet. The simple value of data security, not to mention the inter-operability between the data generated and things like, I dunno... check printing and direct deposit, for example, seems obvious.
I'd also guess there would be a lot less work for their accounting department. Either they could save the expense of one or two peoples' salaries, or at least spread the workload savings among the staff. In any event, it simply doesn't make sense not to modernize it.
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One critical irreplaceable part breaks ...
Breaks? Guess you haven't seen how those old systems were made. You could rearrange it and make a dandy trash compactor for modern computers.
Re:One vacuum tube away from disaster (Score:5, Insightful)
A week or two??? How many enterprise systems have you installed? I've been on a couple of these implementations and it just takes a team of people many months of work. The larger the company the longer it takes. One install, for a customer with less than 300 employees took 8 months. Its not as simple as you make it out to be.
Article title (Score:2)
"Don't mess with Texas's old computers."
Seriously, don't mess with them or they will stop working. I feel like just taking a picture of the insides of that thing will make it fall apart.
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Also, the label on the computer says "new A/R daily invoice"
New... in the 1960s.
It's a Zeberpupin System! (Score:3)
Indiana Jones says (Score:3)
It BELONGS in a MUSEUM!!!
Even more on the subject (Score:4, Informative)
If It Ain't Broke, Don't Fix It: Ancient Computers in Use Today [pcworld.com]
Support contract (Score:2)
How much is the IBM support contract for this?
Not a Computer, its a tabulator (Score:4, Interesting)
nuclear war resistant (Score:4, Funny)
One of the biggest problems with IT is (Score:5, Insightful)
change for the sake of change. Let me say up front that i've worked in IT for over 15 years. Mostly as a DBA but I did network admin, hardware, development and OS.
I keep hearing how the next version will do X, save Y amount of time and Z money. Won't require as many people to maintain it, etc. Yet it never seems to be the case. Vendors keep us on a continuous upgrade cycle because bug fixes aren't back ported or to get the latest security patches, etc. Managers, architects seem to focus more on resume building than a stable environment.
I can't get any commitment for maintaining production but if i'm an hour late on a project task i'll have an army standing in my cubicle harassing me. I constantly hear developers wanting to go back to the basics because the new piece of software that's supposed to make their life easier isn't as stable.
Yes, I love to play with the latest and greatest features but i'm not sure if from the companies perspective if its always worth the money. I have to say working in IT support can be a very frustrating and stressful job.
Tabulating machine operations (Score:5, Informative)
I used all that gear in high school and high school summer jobs. I've wired panels for an IBM 402, an IBM 407 (the last of the electromechanical accounting machines and the best one), a 514/519 reproducer (a 519 has a mark sense reader option), and the 77 and 84 collators. And, of course, card sorters and punches. I was able to draw graphs with a 402 and generate poetry with an 84 collator. This is pushing the limits of those machines.
The normal processing cycle for a sales/billing operation looks like this:
The card operations aren't that bad. All this stuff is slow, but automatic. The data entry is the labor-intensive part of the operation.
Have to say, it's kinda cool. (Score:3)
I have to admit, that actually *is* sorta cool. Imagine, you can probably repair a bit on that computer with a well-bent paperclip. When everything goes down the drain, this thing will still be up and running, maintainable and you will be able to build your own spare parts for it using a regular toolbox and a soldering iron.
Then again, my very first computer, a PC 1402 Sharp Pocket Computer from 1986 with cashstrip printer is probably like a bazillion times faster and more powerfull than that thing. It would probalby take less than two weeks to replace the entire workflow with a single cheap-ass current programmable calculator and you could add some features along the way. That makes it quite strange too. Cool, but very strange.
My 2 cents.
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I have to admit, that actually *is* sorta cool. Imagine, you can probably repair a bit on that computer with a well-bent paperclip.
The trouble is... that being broken, and getting 'stuck' at an incorrect value, might not necessarily be detected, as quickly as a blue screen would be detected...
Punch card devices have this problem of verification, where a card could get lost, misread, or incorrectly punched
So you need additional error checking at higher layers, that a PC would take care of at a lowe
Re:If it ain't broke... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:If it ain't broke... (Score:5, Insightful)
I mostly agree with you, but I've also been on a couple of projects trying to replace 30+ year old custom-built mainframe applications.
I've seen a couple where people try to replace it with more modern software, but nothing which isn't built from scratch can even come close. It usually lacks 30-40 years of tweaks and fixes to do everything they need, often completely changes the workflow, and opens up vast amounts of data transformation you need to do to pull in all of the legacy data into the new system.
I've seen several of these projects fail after a significant amount of time and money was sunk into it as people realized it wasn't possible to build something which did all of the same things.
Sometimes, no matter how hard you try, it can be an exceedingly expensive thing to replace old systems like that. So much so that it isn't feasible for companies to really undertake it.
However, that just pushes out the problem, and sooner or later, you end up with a defunct system and no replacement.
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That's great if you have something they have a plan which it covers.
But I once worked at a place where the mainframe guy had retired, was drawing his pension, and had been hired back as a consultant at 3-4x his previous salary because there wasn't anybody on the planet who could run the old system. Literally, since he'd been the one who maintained it for several decades.
Not all legacy systems are something you can easily move away from, much to the chagrin of the people who own them. I've literally seen s
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I'm imagining a Smartphone app that can pictures of punchcards, then execute them.
(In case I'm actually the first person to think of this, I hereby grant any patent interest to the public domain.)
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This thing isn't a mainframe really. It's much more like your tabulating adding machines with the printer roll on the back. "Programming" is essentially just figuring out what calculation to do. I think that advantage that this system has is that you enter the numbers once onto cards and then you can run them through with different calculations instead of typing the numbers in a second time like you would on a calculator.
Re:If it ain't broke... (Score:4, Informative)
Nothing good happens without analysis and specifications up front.
Frequently the consulting company analysts are more interested in the user interface, where very little happens! But that is the sexy part, of course.
Re:If it ain't broke... (Score:5, Insightful)
And, with legacy systems, the problem is you can do a huge amount of analysis and specifications -- and still end up having no idea how the system works for all of those corner cases nobody ever mentioned and which can't be shoe horned into what you've now got.
On one of the projects I was on, at the beginning we did the analysis, and asked them a bunch of questions on how it worked and what the constraints were. We got told thinks like "This can never happen, this is always true, this is always structured like that".
So you build a system which takes the concrete assumptions they've given you, and then get farther into the process when it suddenly becomes "well, sometimes they can look like this but not always, sometimes that isn't true either, and in a few cases it's entirely different from everything else".
Then you can quickly discover what you've spent a year building can't possibly work, because in some cases, 1+1 really does equal sqrt(67.89), and you can't make that fit anything you've built since there wasn't supposed to be any real numbers (or whatever metaphor works for you).
Often because what the company wants is to start with is screen mock-ups because they're focused on the new UI, and it's not until you get deep into the ugly bits that you realize half of what they told you about the actual process is blatantly wrong.
Sadly, the complexity of system that old can be beyond anything that can be conveyed, or even fully known by the people who own it. And the more specialized the software domain, the more you're likely to find all sorts of things like that.
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It's not even always a lie, which is the most frustrating part of replacing legacy applications.
People often simply don't know, or don't have a complete picture of all of the dark and scary corners that are in there, or don't realize that things even are dark and scary corners. Several decades worth of tweaks and adjustments makes for an almost intractable problem in some cases.
Since those projects, every time I've been near anything which says "we're going to re
Re:If it ain't broke... (Score:4, Informative)
"Between 60 and 80 per cent of all business transactions performed worldwide are processed—very effectively and efficiently—by COBOL programs running on mainframes. Within the financial industry (banks and insurance), COBOL is used extensively to process the vast majority of their transactions."
https://scs.senecac.on.ca/~timothy.mckenna/offline/COBOL_not_dead_yet.htm [senecac.on.ca]
I stopped writing COBOL in about 1985, but we were smart people, and our code was pretty good. It has lived all this time. Most of the new wave crap I have been involved in since has drifted off somewhere. It was relatively easy to create, but the technologies changed so fast that most of it was ephemeral. I bet some of my CICS is still running!
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It doesn't even have to be as large as a mainframe application.
For my senior thesis for my Bachelor's degree, I took on the task of taking on an old DOS flat file "database" system and creating a modern equivalent. I did the same as a sibling post, asking how they use it, what could be what, etc., and then I started to make the program. As I did so, I started looking at the data it held for myself--the format (which I forget at the moment, but I think it was something from IBM) could designate "columns" wi
Re:If it ain't broke... (Score:5, Informative)
The question which everyone is ignoring is 'why are they still using this'? The speculation is that they are lazy, cheap, protecting jobs, stupid, etc. However, there is a video of the company on YouTube, and if you watch it you can see why they are still using this machine. The whole place is run by punch cards. They use punch cards for inventory control, job time counting, and controlling some of the industrial machinery. This machine is just used to run reports of inventory, etc.
Could this all be replaced? Of course. Is it as simple as a spreadsheet? Not even close.
Note that it is not at all uncommon to be in this situation. Industrial equipment lasts far longer than IT. For some reason, companies seem reluctant to spend a few million dollars replacing perfectly functional equipment just because the IT aspects of it are outdated.
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There's a point when the sheer number of paradigm shifts has made the implemented way silly. The power requirements alone should indicate that. I think that the IC in my computer keyboard is powerful enough to handle all of their tasks.
If you ever watch the Terry Gilliam film Brazil, pay attention to the tech. They took a basic tech and never expanded on it to improve it properly. Instead one had three inch screens with Fresnel lenses to make the image bigger, typewriters with electrica
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Wood herself is going to be phased out... it's called death.
That's another major problem here. The system they have might work, but when there is only a couple of people in the whole country that can use it then the company could have a major problem on their hands at literally ANY moment.
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It might ... if you don't count the man-hours needed to rewrite the software and the constant effort needed to keep a 10-year-old PC from imploding.
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In 1973 a small company could buy a computer to keep books, so well it can still be used today, but just ten years earlier, NASA, with a budget of 6% of the USA's GDP, wasn't able to use computers to help design the F-1 engines?
Amazing what the invention of the microchip brought about, isn't it?