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Building The Navy Intranet
wiredog writes "The Washington Post Business section has an article about the ongoing upgrade/integration of the US Navy's computer systems. The $6.9 billion project is the largest Federal IT project ever attempted. The mission is to get rid of, or upgrade, all the old software still in use (including, I kid you not, WordStar), do the same for all the hardware (including, I kid you not, typewriters), and link it all together. There are 100,000 different applications that have to be evaluated, and then either upgraded or replaced. I remember using WordStar. 20 years ago."
I kid you not, wordstar probably NEVER crashes on them. :)
This is something I've never understood about IT upgrades.
If wordstar and typewriters are working, why spend $6b to replace them?
A lot of IT spending seems like "make work" projects to me.
I'm truly amazed that the security of this country relies indirectly on products "that were not engineered for security".
The Raven
The Raven
Vi and EMACS are great, but for word processing, and I don't me lame desktop publishing which is what most programs like MS-Word and WordPerfect do today, for word processing, no one has created a better interface. Once you know the commands, you can virtually fly through editing a text document. Emacs and Vi are good, but they are designed for editing source code, not text.
Wordstar Still rules!
ttyl
Farrell
CAN-CON 2019 - Ottawa's only book oriented Science Fiction Convention! October 18-20, Sheraton Hotel, Ottawa, Canada h
including, I kid you not, typewriters), and link it all together
Once all the dot matrix printers were replaced with laser printers, a typewriter was the only thing that would work on carbon paper. Remember carbon paper?!!!!
I'm a writer, a poet, a genius, I know it. I don't buy software, I grow it.
Exactly what is so laughable about using WordStar and typewriters ? A competent WordStar user (and in the day, Wordstar was THE word processor for power users) could almost certainly outdo the best Microsoft Word or free-software-Word-clone user in 95% of the everyday typing tasks that people need to do.
And typewriters still DO have their place. A good typewriter is still the fastest way to fill out a form, or fill out a label to put on a file folder, or even, sometimes, whip out a quick letter.
Ridiculing tried-and-proven technology is about as arrogant as ridiculing conventional mail.
95% of computer users would be just as productive with a typewriter and a subscription to [fill in the blank] pr0n magazines.
don't be knocking wordstar or typewriters when they get the job done usually just as well.
your jesus is another mans xebu. chew on that hypocrites.
Are you kidding? ADA was an utter failure.
It was supposed to be an common language for all embedded applications, and it's design goals were object oriented design, orthagonality, and was to promote clear and reusable code. It was to undo the use of dozens of different languages for different tasks.
But the applications were so varied, ADA started being pumped full of hardware-specific and mostly redundant commands, and eventually became a complete bloated mess. So each device had it's own implementation of ADA, and there was barely enough common ground to call it all the same language.
It was supposed to be Java, and it ended up more complicated than the bastard child of FORTRAN and C++, abandoned and raised in the wild by a tribe of assemblers.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Have you ever seen a blue screen on a 2600? Kind of puts the whole "wiping out most of the life on the planet" thing into perspective, doesn't it?
Remember that neophilia isn't necessarily the first criterion when designing systems designed to do things which affect, as you so accurately pointed out, most of the lives on the planet - all while being depth charged.
OK, there have been uncountable posts now that discuss the pros and cons of WordStar.
The issue was not that everybody used WordStar and that now they have to switch. The issue was they everybody used a zillion different programs (of which WordStar was one example).
The idea is, as many other have pointed out, to improve communications. A first step is to make sure that applications are standardized. If everybody had used WordStar, they could probably have made this happen with that program, but in reality M$ Word was probably much more common.
Tor
I've tried scanning forms, then editing the scanned files in various tools, but it never worked right.
They may be getting rid of some of those beasts, but the armed forces love forms, so they're going to still need typewriters :)
A friend of mine tells me that the army is trying to go paperless. They now get emailed publications and are specifically prohibited from printing them out -- and they're punished if caught printing them out. Ack!
Just because something can be replaced with a shiny new gizmo does not mean that it should be replaced. If the old process is good enough and is well-understood by the crew then what benefit is there to replacing it? It is rather sad that you could not see the whole boat as a large, complicated process and understand the elegance and graceful degradation in the face of component failure that is built-in to these systems. Maybe once you understand the technical challenges of designing fault-tolerance complex systems you will start to appreciate these boats for the marvels of systems and process integration that they can be...
If you're comparing the US Navy's antiquated technology to some other country's Navy and wondering how the US, the world's largest superpower can be so ridiculously far behind, consider this.
While FOO may have modern systems now, 20 years ago they probably had no IT at all, compared to how the US Navy was running cutting edge WordStar. Such is the case for financial networks in the US vs. Europe. They're old and crappy here, but we've had them since the 60s, whereas Europe is only getting them fairly recently.
Legacy systems support is a huge bitch. And who the hell are Electronic Data Systems? I swear, all of these companies that work with the public sector have such generic names. Are they chosen just because their names are so generic or what?
Criminy!