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The specific machine type is moot and just clickbait. The way I heard this one, the crux was the machine he used was not network connected. Madoff needed to be able to calculate customer account positions after he already knew the share prices. Due to the lack of network the machine needed the prices input manually, which introduces a delay. So he could select which shares customers had "purchased" after the fact. If he bought modern off the shelf software it wouldn't necessarily have this quirk where you could retrospectively decide which shares the customer owned. He may have found it hard to justify asking someone to write new software for a new machine with this feature without them getting suspicious. So he kept the old machine going.



> If he bought modern off the shelf software it wouldn't necessarily have this quirk where you could retrospectively decide which shares the customer owned. He may have found it hard to justify asking someone to write new software for a new machine with this feature without them getting suspicious. So he kept the old machine going.

As mentioned in the link referenced by this comment[0]:

> Perez and O’Hara were found guilty for their role in the fraud, and were sentenced by U.S. District Judge Laura Taylor Swain to two-and-a-half years in prison, which was the minimum sentence.

So even for the old machine that they continued to use, its programmers were found to be guilty i.e. they knew what they were doing was wrong.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29359292#29360041


I see. So they had also added features to it that had enabled the fraud. It wasn't just the older software was accidentally convenient. Either way the AS/400 angle is not really relevant.




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