
The oldest computer in use by the U.S. government - danso
https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2016/sep/23/governments-oldest-computer-isnt-technically-compu/
======
jmbwell
There is a lot to be said for systems that do their jobs despite their age,
and which have been validated and refined over the course of decades.

In many ways, I'd rather maintain an old, well tested system than a modern
system with widely available exploits, conflicting commercial interests, and
rapid obsolescence.

~~~
cmdrfred
An abacus has an exceptionally small attack surface when you think about it.

~~~
jeff_marshall
Too true - both the negative (who wants to program an abacus), and the
positive (there is no magic in this program/device).

I feel like developers tend to favor the magic, due to the burden it relieves,
without having to consider the negatives due to the way the business of
software works.

~~~
userbinator
Not all developers, but I'd say that certainly the majority seem easily
entranced by the "latest and greatest" especially in some areas of software;
web development is the most prominent example to come to mind.

~~~
Yxven
Web development has the most innovation because it is the least entrenched. It
is not hard to write a bare-bones web application that produces output that
can be read on browsers everywhere.

Compare that to the difficulty of writing a cross-platform GUI framework. It's
not even easy to write bindings for existing GUIs because it's hard to wrap
C++ in a way that doesn't have you manually managing memory or discarding
other language features and philosophies.

This is why we're seeing the Electron approach to GUI apps grow. It's easier
to write bindings for chromium and feed it HTML.

~~~
pjmlp
No, we are seeing Electron because Web hipsters never coded in anything else
other than JavaScript.

------
apaprocki
The IRS itself goes into detail: [https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-
pia/imf_pia.pdf](https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pia/imf_pia.pdf)

"IMF is located at the Enterprise Computing Center – Martinsburg (ECC-MTB) and
resides on the MITS-21 GSS. IMF is written in Assembler Language Code (ALC).
There are no direct users of IMF. IMF receives data from an array of systems
and then sends data to several systems as well."

MITS-21 GSS == "Modernized Information Technology Services (MITS)- 21, IBM
Master File General Support System (GSS)"

[https://www.treasury.gov/tigta/auditreports/2011reports/2011...](https://www.treasury.gov/tigta/auditreports/2011reports/201120074fr.pdf)

There are two mainframe systems, Unisys and IBM:

"The Unisys mainframe at the Martinsburg Computing Center processes all of the
centralized Individual Taxpayer Information File workload for the 10 IRS
campuses. The Unisys mainframe at the Memphis Computing Center processes all
of the centralized Business Taxpayer Information File workload for the 10
campuses.

The Unisys mainframe at the Martinsburg Computing Center is configured to run
with 950 MIPS for normal weekday processing. For weekend processing, the
Unisys mainframe at the Martinsburg Computing Center borrows MIPS from the
development and test environments to increase capacity to 1,200 MIPS for
managing the increased workload. The borrowed MIPS are returned to their
respective systems on Monday mornings to support weekday processing. The
Unisys mainframe at the Memphis Computing Center is configured to run with 675
MIPS for normal weekday processing."

"In October 2010, the IRS upgraded its Martinsburg Computing Center mainframe
computers from the IBM z/9-series mainframes to the IBM z/196-series
mainframes."

The report even provides nice utilization graphs.. Your government at work.

edit: The type of Unisys systems "The IRS Unisys mainframe environment
contains two Dorado 280 mainframe computers, with one located at the
Martinsburg Computing Center and one at the Memphis Computing Center. Because
vendor hardware support will be discontinued as of December 31, 2011, the IRS
has decided to upgrade the Dorado 280s to Dorado 780s during Fiscal Year
2011."

~~~
quasse
For anyone else who was curious, an Intel i5 2500k runs at about 83,000 MIPS
compared to the 1,200 of the entire IRS Mainframe.

~~~
sliverstorm
Main-frame specialty is crazy IO, I'm told, not raw muscle

~~~
jcrawfordor
Yes, the number of instructions per 'business operation' in a mainframe is
typically much, much smaller than on something like an x86. This dates back to
IBM's early habit of implementing all instructions in lengthy microcode,
resulting in instructions that were relatively slow to execute but did complex
things, typically taking an entire high level operation (e.g. sum all these
numbers) and making it one instruction. A big part of making this happen is
the IO model on mainframes which is much more integrated than x86
professionals are used to. In general files on mainframes are not binary blobs
but schema-compliant tables similar to an RDBMS, a fact that is leveraged at a
very low level when programming for mainframes.

This leads to a very different kind of thinking from using microcomputers. I
highly recommend that anyone in computing learn to use a mainframe or at least
minicomputer operating system, which is affordable thanks to services like
PUB400 from RZKH which provides free access to an IBM i minicomputer. Yes,
these systems are uncommon today outside of certain specific market verticals
(e.g. finance), but the exercise will show you a very different way of
organizing a computer system that might help you think outside of the *nix-
style box.

------
dahart
> We did indeed find the oldest computer in government, but it’s not really a
> computer at all; it’s computer software.

What a complete disappointment! I was hoping to read about some crazy legacy
hardware they were still using. Software?! Yeah... no, that does not count as
the oldest computer in government.

In general, does a software's age alone really give any cause for concern? In
my book, software that survives 56 years is proved solid. Software that is new
is guaranteed to have bugs.

> I’m starting to have a lot of questions about this tax software and the
> management around it.

This does seem like muck-raking by a non-expert with little to no real
context... Is that what Muckrock does? This software was audited, presumably
by experts, and people looking directly at it acknowledge it's hard to
maintain and still conclude there's no immediate need to replace it. What
evidence is there that this conclusion is in dire need of re-examination?

------
unsignedqword
The article mentions that the oldest _actual_ computer in use by the
government regards nuclear strike operations, and that it's actually being
upgraded sometimes next year. I find this...concerning? Says they're upgrading
terminals and data storage, which seems pretty harmless, but I feel like in
terms of nuke-launching tech, "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" is a pretty
good philosophy to live by.

~~~
KC8ZKF
How do you know it ain't broke?

~~~
unsignedqword
True, but I'd at least regard such a system as likely fairly fault tolerant,
considering its been in use for 50+ years.

~~~
subway
I'm sure plenty of replacement parts of EOL by decades. Heck, the terminal
upgrades alone are likely necessitated by the fact CRTs are no longer
manufactured in quantity.

~~~
omegaham
I was running into this doing requisitions for a precision approach radar that
was commissioned in the late 60s. By this point, all of the part suppliers had
long since moved on to other things or gone out of business, and the usual
avenue became "Order the part, and wait for enough air stations to also need
the same part. Then, and only then, will the government commission a custom
fabrication job to manufacture the parts needed for an obscene amount of
money."

Two results happened. First, we ended up paying $15k for parts that were worth
$500 because that's what it costs to set up a fabrication job when you only
want 50 circuit boards. Second, we did whatever the hell we could to avoid
having to spend $15k on a $500 part, and the radar was therefore held together
with gummy bears, duct tape, and black magic. It was a clusterfuck, and we
were always putting out fires with that thing, sometimes literally.

Horrifyingly, the military has never been able to create a better PAR, which
is why it's been around for so damn long.

I got out in 2014, and last I've heard, they just re-extended the EOL for the
radar to 2025. They'll probably be sending out lance corporals with binoculars
and walkie-talkies to yell "TOO HIGH" and "TOO LOW" by then.

~~~
vonmoltke
> Horrifyingly, the military has never been able to create a better PAR, which
> is why it's been around for so damn long.

Not enough pork involved for a Congresscritter to push it and not flashy
enough for a flag officer to do so.

------
emersonrsantos
It's not difficult to find those systems in the government and some big
companies. Adding logic to some some source code that was last modified in
1985 and recompile it 30 years later is magical.

~~~
semi-extrinsic
Indeed. The Norwegian IRS equivalent still publishes updated Cobol programs
that businesses can use to calculate employee taxes:

[http://www.skatteetaten.no/en/Bedrift-og-
organisasjon/Drive-...](http://www.skatteetaten.no/en/Bedrift-og-
organisasjon/Drive-bedrift/Arbeidsgiver/employers-order-electronic-tax-
deduction-cards/Documentation-and-program-for-calculating-prepayment-
deductions-2014-and-2015-income-years/)

------
Spooky23
Its all about cost and rish. These are bespoke systems that were written
decades ago -- the entire operations of the agencies were organized around the
abilities of the system.

In the 60s, there was a clear ROI, the money spent zapped an army of clerks.
Standing up a new system is high cost, high risk, and brings low measurable
benefit.

------
chris_wot
Sounds like the cheapest way of upgrading hardware for the IRS is to write an
emulator that can understand IMF assembler and stick it in a virtualised
environment. Given the server it is running on is now underpowered, a medium
sized server could handle what it does at a fraction of the cost.

~~~
kalleboo
The article says it's already running on modern IBM mainframes.

> "While they’ve upgraded the hardware to more modern IBM mainframes, those
> mainframes are still running vintage assembly."

This is one reason IBM is still popular - their modern mainframes are
backwards-compatible with 50-year old software.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_System_z](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_System_z)

> The System z family maintains full backward compatibility. In effect,
> current systems are the direct, lineal descendants of System/360, announced
> in 1964, and the System/370 from the 1970s. Many applications written for
> these systems can still run unmodified on the newest System z over five
> decades later

~~~
chris_wot
Is there a reason for them to upgrade this system to newer languages?

~~~
pjmlp
Yes, to bring modern software to those platforms.

All IBM mainframes support C, C++ and Java in addition to the platform
original languages.

~~~
chris_wot
That's not really a reason with a business case attached. That's just "these
other languages are modern, use them instead!".

~~~
pjmlp
No, it is the other way around and it surely has a business case.

Instead of throwing out the investment done in years in the mainframe
hardware, because juniors cannot grasp old technologies or don't feel like
using them, bring them into the mainframe, while keeping the investment into
the existing working stack.

Instead of writing a REST API in RPG, which doesn't know anything about Web
APIs, used to create the customer support application, make use of JEE/Spring
instead to provide a SOAP/REST API.

Just a possible business case, that is actually used in production for Java
applications on IBM mainframes.

------
ComputerGuru
*that we know of.

(So this isn't a garbage comment: I imagine somewhere deep in Mt Cheyenne and
elsewhere there are some even older milspec machines that have been running
archaic code since mainframes were first invented.)

------
valleyer
The DOD one ("Strategic Automated Command and Control System") claims to be 53
years old and run on a Series/1\. But Series/1 first came out in 1976, 40
years ago. Anyone understand the discrepancy?

~~~
steanne
"We did indeed find the oldest computer in government, but it’s not really a
computer at all; it’s computer software."

~~~
valleyer
Except... I read that sentence as referring to the IRS systems, not the DOD
system. Am I wrong? It's confusingly written.

------
dendory
In the short term, there's always a lot more risks in scraping an old system
and spinning up a new one, especially in large complex organizations. However,
in the long term you're really better off with modern systems.

So it really is a difficult trade off.

------
teh_klev
Previous similar discussion:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11772966](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11772966)

------
Overtonwindow
Ha! Bravo! That is some old software! This hunt has reminded me of The Cuckoos
Egg by Clifford Stoll.

~~~
chris_wot
Oh, fantastic read. It read it again the other day and I suspect that Stohl
got mixed up with the NSA but didn't enjoy it too much.

~~~
contingencies
Why?

~~~
chris_wot
They gave him short shrift, and he was a Berkeley man who was more at home at
a Grateful Dead concert than tracking down overseas hackers.

He only discovered the issue because he was trying to teach himself how to
program, and decided to chase down a problem with a discrepancy on the
timeshared server that was causing it to be out of balance by about 5 cents.

~~~
Overtonwindow
Correction: 75 cents ;-)

~~~
chris_wot
I stand corrected :-)

------
peter303
Probably why the core IRS systems have not been hacked yet because few hackers
know IBM 360, COBOL and 9 track tapes. New peripheral systems like the
transcript request system have been hacked.

------
amelius
How does this machine compare to a modern cellphone?

~~~
soneil
That's actually a very difficult comparison to make, because your expectations
of them are so entirely different.

Will your phone:

    
    
      * Still be useful in 5 years
      * Still be functioning in 10 years
      * Still be receiving vendor support in 50 years
    

The actual "wow, my phone is faster than a 5-year-old desktop" makes fun
headlines, but is entirely irrelevant.

~~~
amelius
If governments insisted that all hardware should come with a spec that runs on
a universal virtual machine, then today I could probably run the old machine
on my phone. But alas, thanks again to an unvisionary government, we're stuck
with old hardware.

~~~
LoSboccacc
IBM i software was compiled as platform independent binary and converted into
machine specific code by the operating system. Ok, it's a propietary spec far
from being open etc, but the tech is there and even better than a vm (in
certain aspects)

------
musgrove
And they're still using it with admin as the username and password as the
password.

