
What Is the Oldest Computer Program Still in Use? - amalantony06
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/538966/what-is-the-oldest-computer-program-still-in-use/
======
zigzigzag
I think the more interesting thing about these ancient programs is the
question of why projects to modernise them fail over and over again. Of course
we can already guess many of the answers without even reading any post-
mortems, but obviously these organisations were able to execute complex IT
projects once upon a time and over the years lost that ability, leaving them
stranded with ancient systems.

In the case of MOCAS I'm going to assume it's all of the standard reasons:
weak management, absence of competition, over-reliance on the same small pool
of defence contractors that know how to navigate byzantine federal procurement
rules, etc.

~~~
coldtea
> _I think the more interesting thing about these ancient programs is the
> question of why projects to modernise them fail over and over again._

A lot of it is because they fail the KISS principle.

~~~
bch
Specifically, suffer from second system effect [0].

[0] [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-
system_effect](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect)

~~~
tluyben2
While we were building a web frontend on top of an insurance system written in
Cobol running on a mainframe, another team was trying to port that Cobol to
Java. I often talked to those guys as we were in the same IT basement and
indeed, they were to port it and 'and some things'. That project failed while
ours is still running on that Cobol system.

~~~
tluyben2
Can't edit (yet?) but obvious typo 'and = 'add.

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russellbeattie
Because of its longevity, replacing the program will essentially mean
replicating all the logic so that its input and output is perfectly duplicated
- including any bugs or quirks it has. Any differences, I'm sure, will end up
causing a domino effect of failures and inaccuracies in all the _other_
antiquated systems this program talks to. So then the question becomes, "why
bother?" and 58 years later it still chugs along. I know of code I personally
wrote over a decade ago still being used in production happily every day, so
I'm sure this is bound to be a much more common experience in the years to
come.

~~~
iaw
It was written by Grace Hopper, there are no bugs ;)

~~~
portlander12345
They wouldn't dare.

~~~
iaw
The first thing I did was scan the article for her name. She was such an
amazing person in so many ways that I'm in awe.

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bigiain
For me, I still occasionally get a server monitoring email from a cron job
running a Perl program that first mailed me in April '97\. I've got no idea
who's keeping that running... The "startup" I wrote that for (and later went
to work for) has been dead a decade now.

(Scary though: this might mean _someone_ is still running a Redhat 5 or 6
linux machine or VM - that's a late'90's vintage Redhat, not Redhat Enterprise
Linux. It's _possible_ I updated that Perl script when we moved to CentOS in
the early 2000's, but surely if anyne's been updating it since then - they'd
surely have taken my personal email address out of it???)

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protomikron
Slightly off-topic, but meta user interface relevant:

IMHO Google has been so successful because of their user interface and not
because of its superior algorithm. In essence it is a REPL where the E part is
slightly non-trivial.

But I agree it is the best user interface. Files and processes are a great
thing, but the shell built on-top of it glues everything together and for me
is the most successful interface. However it would be nice to switch
interpreters _online_ , i.e. switch between e.g. Bash or Python and "human
language" (like Google Search). Interestingly DuckDuckGo provides something
similar via its '!' syntax.

~~~
metaxy2
I think at least at first, Google's success was definitely because of the
algorithm. Existing search engines were _terrible_. They primarily relied on
text analysis and human edited web directories. You could search for something
as basic as "pet food" and get a few relevant results and then a bunch of
random garbage. When Google came out using PageRank, it was a whole new world.
Every tech savvy person I know switched right away, and not because of the
interface.

But no doubt the simple and elegant interface helped too, and has helped them
stay ahead as the other search engines have caught up with their algorithm.

~~~
nickpsecurity
I agree. That PageRank was patented is only reason Google is what they are
today. They would've been copycatted to much lower revenues or market share.

~~~
nl
That's completely untrue.

There were numerous well-understood PageRank alternatives available at the
time (eg HITS was published in 1999[1]).

Google did lots of things right (good algorithm, good scaling, good UI, text-
based advertising, spam handling, no portal etc), and to say it was "only
PageRank" is just wrong.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HITS_algorithm](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HITS_algorithm)

~~~
nickpsecurity
Never heard of HITS for some reason. Thanks for the tip. A quick Google for
comparisons between two give this:

[http://www.slideshare.net/shatakirti/pagerank-and-
hits](http://www.slideshare.net/shatakirti/pagerank-and-hits)

[http://www.ijarcce.com/upload/2014/february/IJARCEE9J_a_pooj...](http://www.ijarcce.com/upload/2014/february/IJARCEE9J_a_pooja_comparative.pdf)

The first indicated PageRank has less disadvantages like spam. The second sums
up the result here:

"page rank is more popular algorithm... due to the features like efficiency,
feasibility, less query time cost, less susceptibility to localized links, etc
which are absent in the HITS algorithm"

If that's true, then my claim would stand as HITS wouldn't have been good
enough without a lot of modification. Google also got me better results than
Ask that used HITS. If such claims are wrong, then you might be right. It
would take more than a quick search to know.

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

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drdeadringer
I read a book by Vernor Vinge where the main character did some software
archeology as part of his hobby and technological interests. He discovered
that the program used to keep time was viciously ancient, and after looking
into "epoch" figured that the old-calendar year "1970" must have been decided
upon because "that was when humanity first landed on the moon".

------
sho_hn
> It’s widely accepted that the first computer program was written by Ada
> King, Countess of Lovelace, in 1842

Hmm. Hasn't this been widely disputed and disproven? I wonder why it keeps
being circulated, and with such a bold tone.

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stevenjgarner
Emacs and vi date back to at least 1976:
[http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/bitwise/2014/05/old...](http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/bitwise/2014/05/oldest_software_rivalry_emacs_and_vi_two_text_editors_used_by_programmers.html)

------
drdeadringer
My first real job out of college, classic DoD contractor gig, I walked in and
was shown the spiffy VAX I was going to be using. I didn't know which was
older, the computer or me. There's one sitting in the Computer History MUseum
in Mountain View. Wirewrap, 4mb of RAM maximum and each 1mb was a square foot
of circuit-board you'd have to slide in and lock into place with thumb-tabs. I
felt my own obsolescent like an angry itch every day I showed up for work and
turned it on.

The way I understand it, the Navy got tired of supporting that. "If you want
more of our money, you'll upgrade this crap." So they did, and now it's one
server rack with, wouldn't you know, such modern things like USB ports and
21st century OSs and ethernet capability. But that's crazy talk.

------
pogo
Here's a great article with many more examples:

[http://www.pcworld.com/article/249951/computers/if-it-
aint-b...](http://www.pcworld.com/article/249951/computers/if-it-aint-broke-
dont-fix-it-ancient-computers-in-use-today.html)

My favorite is the 90 yr old Texas company that uses an IBM 402 from 1948. The
computer uses plugboards - breadboard-like cards that are programmed by
plugging wires like a patch panel. As of the date of the article (2012) they
still used the plugboards, as well as a more modern card reader/puncher.

Edit: I just realized my example is also mentioned in the OP article, though
there is more detail (and photos) in the PCWorld article I linked.

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toomanybeersies
Ironically (I think? Or is it Fittingly?), they're probably using MOCAS to try
and find a replacement for MOCAS.

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throwawayish
Notedly it runs on a very small configuration of an IBM mainframe (z10 BC - 8
GB of RAM), costing less than 100k USD.

~~~
tyingq
Not practical/legal due to IBM licensing, but the open source hercules
emulator is stable enough to even run current z/OS on a linux box:
[http://pastebin.com/umhdBsPu](http://pastebin.com/umhdBsPu)

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toolslive
what about these ?
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barrel_organ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barrel_organ)

~~~
flashman
Is an organ really in the 'computer' class of machine? It doesn't "carry out
an arbitrary set of arithmetic or logical operations," to quote the Wikipedia
definition.

A barrel organ could be said to follow a 'program', if we're loose enough to
mean 'a set of machine-readable instructions that cause a process to take
place' but it is in no sense calculating a result based on logical operations.

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timthelion
"You can still find antique green-screen systems if you look hard—in some
cases, a pleasant Web interface just disguises the old guts." \- There is so
much wrong with this sentiment! It's just kind of folded in there, the
insinuation that "web interfaces are more pleasant" than TUIs. I cannot
express how much this kind of writting annoys me. Why can't they tell the
story without wedging in unbacked opinions. The sentence "You can still find
antique green-screen systems if you look hard—in some cases, a Web interface
just disguises the old guts." would work just as well.

~~~
bunderbunder
I think that you might be very nearly alone in your sentiment that green
screens offer as good a user interface as more recent technologies.

~~~
jwilliams
I've seen it many times, particularly in finance which still has plenty of
VT100 applications.

The reason is that once you know the codes, you can navigate and enter data at
a genuinely incredible rate. If you've ever watched an experienced operator on
one of these applications you'd be amazed. For one loan processing
application, the terminal was an order of magnitude faster than the Web-based
interface that was being deployed.

The key here though, is "experienced". This is someone who has developed the
knowledge and muscle-memory to operate at that speed. This also makes the
system more brittle (and often harder to change). Critically, it also means it
takes a lot of training and time for people to be productive.

The reason many big organizations dropped the terminals - they wanted to be
able to train people quicker, not because it was more productive.

~~~
coldtea
> _The key here though, is "experienced"._

The other key is that those people and those "POS" style apps do very little
things -- mostly a single task like e.g. bank accounts management.

~~~
jwilliams
The example I put in there was loan applications, which are quite complex.
Loan origination (especially Business Loans) is perhaps the most complex
business process I've ever encountered.

