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The most obsolete infrastructure money could buy – my worst job ever

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Re: The most obsolete infrastructure money could buy – my worst job ever

#161

Post by angersock »

prawn wrote: post #141
mekael wrote: post #55

Ah legacy enterprise software/hardware, it keeps me employed and insane. Where i currently work we have a system which was originally designed in '69(coding started in 75) running on an ibm iSeries. It's old old tech and most of the system is cludged together so poorly that instead of being able to write patches we just write wrappers around the applications(micro services really) that modify the program as its runni…

I know of someone who is in the position of your snowbird, though still employed. He almost delights in the fact that there's been no effort to upgrade from something completely reliant on him, even though he knows the situation is crazy. And he has no personal interest in writing himself out of a job. I can't approve of that attitude.

I can't approve of that attitude.

Why not?

Most companies that end up with that kind of hardcore legacy code a) refuse to upgrade on a reasonable basis and b) refuse to compensate their developers in proportion to the value they ultimately deliver.

So, fuck'em. Might as well enjoy the pseudo pension.

Re: The most obsolete infrastructure money could buy – my worst job ever

#162

Post by monochromatic »

_delirium wrote: post #144
steve-howard wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I found this article from Wired earlier this year: http://www.wired.com/2015/02/air-traffic-control/ It doesn't specificaly mention vacuum tubes, but it does explain why it's entirely plausible that they're still around: >This technology is complicated and novel, but that isn't the problem. The problem is that NextGen is a project of the FAA. The agency is primarily a regulatory body, responsible for keeping the nati…

I'm skeptical that the culprit is mainly to be found in specific features of the FAA, and the article doesn't seem to provide much causal evidence of that (though I recognize that it's hard to prove that kind of causality). Major upgrades/replacements/migrations either failing or coming in a decade late and billions over budget is the norm in Fortune 500 companies, too, which leads to a hypothesis that it's a more ge…

> billions over budget

Well, maybe millions. A billion dollars is real money to anything except the federal government.

Re: The most obsolete infrastructure money could buy – my worst job ever

#163

Post by sytringy05 »

Great story!

I worked at a large aerospace manufacturer who had their most important production systems (just for a single factory) running on an ancient VAX.

It was written in the 60's and the original author's son, who was the sole person on the planet who knew anything detailed about it - he was the architect, the dev, the BA, the sysadmin and so on - was due to retire after 35 years with the company.

The DR plan was similar to this - they had found a model of the same computer in a museum somewhere that still worked and they had dibs on it.

In the end they shut down the factory, one of the major factors in that decision was this system. Just too hard to replace it

Re: The most obsolete infrastructure money could buy – my worst job ever

#164

Post by mekael »

grayclhn wrote: post #145
mekael wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm fascinated by things like the aqueducts. The skill to make them is something i can never comprehend.

Overengineeing doesn't take nearly as much skill as you'd think. It would be pretty easy for any of us to design a wall that, if left alone, would last for thousands of years.

I wouldn't disagree that you and I could build a wall that would be fine for a thousand years, but could either of us build a wall that could be used daily for a large part of that time?

I realize the idea of using a wall is awkwardly phrased, and I pre apologize.

Re: The most obsolete infrastructure money could buy – my worst job ever

#165

Post by mekael »

prawn wrote: post #141
mekael wrote: post #55

Ah legacy enterprise software/hardware, it keeps me employed and insane. Where i currently work we have a system which was originally designed in '69(coding started in 75) running on an ibm iSeries. It's old old tech and most of the system is cludged together so poorly that instead of being able to write patches we just write wrappers around the applications(micro services really) that modify the program as its runni…

I know of someone who is in the position of your snowbird, though still employed. He almost delights in the fact that there's been no effort to upgrade from something completely reliant on him, even though he knows the situation is crazy. And he has no personal interest in writing himself out of a job. I can't approve of that attitude.

The weird thing is that he's advocated ditching the application in favor of either a custom written or customized off the shelf product, it's more so that upper upper management said "if it's still making us cash, why chance it?" .

Re: The most obsolete infrastructure money could buy – my worst job ever

#166

Post by JonathonW »

hga wrote: post #137
jonawesomegreen wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is fascinating, thanks for sharing. I had no idea the NYC subway was being run by a 100 year old electro-mechanical system.

The D.C. Metro system was planed in the '60 and constructed in the '70s, with the first operations starting in 1976. It too is based on electro-mechanical relays, although it's more ambitious, after the operator closes the doors and sees all is fine, he hits a "go" button and the system automatically takes the train to the next station, avoiding collisions as long as the "is there a train in the next segment" sensor…

The DC Metro actually (mostly) hasn't used their automatic train control system in full automatic mode since a collision in 2009 that killed nine (for which the ATC system was directly responsible; a faulty circuit both forced a train to stop and rendered it invisible to the control system).

Safe train control seems like it needs a little more sophistication than '60s or '70s tech was able to give. For one, it's common sense that a train that disappears from the system isn't really gone-- but the Metro system couldn't take that into account. Stuff like that should be pretty trivial today.

Re: The most obsolete infrastructure money could buy – my worst job ever

#167

Post by AnthonyMouse »

JonathonW wrote: post #166
hga wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The D.C. Metro system was planed in the '60 and constructed in the '70s, with the first operations starting in 1976. It too is based on electro-mechanical relays, although it's more ambitious, after the operator closes the doors and sees all is fine, he hits a "go" button and the system automatically takes the train to the next station, avoiding collisions as long as the "is there a train in the next segment" sensor…

The DC Metro actually (mostly) hasn't used their automatic train control system in full automatic mode since a collision in 2009 that killed nine (for which the ATC system was directly responsible; a faulty circuit both forced a train to stop and rendered it invisible to the control system). Safe train control seems like it needs a little more sophistication than '60s or '70s tech was able to give. For one, it's comm…

> For one, it's common sense that a train that disappears from the system isn't really gone-- but the Metro system couldn't take that into account. Stuff like that should be pretty trivial today.

It was pretty trivial in the 1970s. Require the sensor for an adjacent segment to be engaged before the sensor for an active segment will disengage.

You can't do any computation with modern computers that you couldn't have done with relays in the 1970s, or the 1870s for that matter. Mechanical relays are slower, less reliable and more expensive than transistors... but they do the same thing.

Re: The most obsolete infrastructure money could buy – my worst job ever

#168

Post by TazeTSchnitzel »

russnewcomer wrote: post #7

I think the most interesting lessons of this story have to do with the following expectations. First, the expectation of support timelines. It seems in tech that support is promised for products far beyond when the vendor should reasonably be expected to support them. Companies make large investments in technology that ultimately aren't long-term enough. Lesson: Any company doing a major project where there is signif…

> I have seen people using NT 4 for critical server infrastructure in 2012

This is rather worrying given how Microsoft abruptly abandoned support for NT 4 when they spotted a security hole they couldn't fix without fundamental changes.

Re: The most obsolete infrastructure money could buy – my worst job ever

#169

Post by mark-r »

rwallace wrote: post #124
me2i81 wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Six characters! Luxury. I worked on a system where we only had five.

Five characters! Luxury. I learned to program on a system where we only had two. (Not joking: on the Commodore eight bit machines, only the first two characters of variable names were significant.)

I learned to program on a BASIC system that had only one. Although strings were suffixed with $, so you could have both A and A$. Did I also mention that only upper case was available?

Re: The most obsolete infrastructure money could buy – my worst job ever

#170

Post by bigger_cheese »

My work is pretty bad.

We have a box running windows 3.1 hooked up to an instrument on our plant. The answer I got when I asked about it was it has a proprietary ISA DAQ card in it with 'flaky' drivers' that prevents us upgrading it.

It's a non critical instrument but is providing 'useful' data I think its some type of microwave radar measurement instrument - very specialised hardware. It's been working well since the 90's so not worth spending money until it fails.

"Proprietary hardware cards" are notorious in industrial control system world they inevitably lock you into some ancient infrastruture when modern hardware and O/S's stop supporting ISA slots and things like that.

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