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Oldest Supported Software?
Dave Santek writes "In development since the early 1970s, the McIDAS [Man computer Interactive Data Access System] software celebrated its 30th anniversary in October 2003. McIDAS is used to integrate and visualize weather information. The software was originally run on a Datacraft /5 and has gone through 4 major hardware configuration changes over the last 30 years. It is a supported software package that remains in use at more than 100 locations worldwide. A history of the first 25 years (pdf) is available. A freeware version of the software is also available."
Air Traffic Control Software: Automated Radar Terminal System (ARTS). The Plain View displays (by Raytheon) in the early '70s had an anticipated lifetime of 1015 years; those in the centers today are now at least 10 years past this estimate.
These displays fail regularly--according to controllers and technicians. At each en route center, which may have 30 to 60 PVDs in operation, it is not unusual to replace two to four of these units a day. When a PVD goes dark, the controller at that station rushes to another screen and urges the controller there to alter his or her display to include aircraft previously tracked on the failed display.
PVDs slipping out of adjustment also cause the size and clarity of the alphanumeric type they display to vary--fuzzy type makes controllers confuse 3s and 8s, which can lead to errors, an Indianapolis controller told IEEE Spectrum. And the units themselves are unstable. Their aging ceramic connectors are brittle and falling apart. Insulation on the wires is brittle, too. The vibration caused in moving a display, as is necessary when a replacement must be brought in, often disables it when fragile connections are broken.
Meanwhile, the Host and ARTS computers that drive the displays are problematically obsolete as well. The Host computer computes radar tracks, maintains a database of flight plans, and issues safety warnings--such as a conflict alert, when two craft are in danger of violating separation standards, and a minimum safe altitude warning, when an aircraft is at risk of hitting terrain. It contains half a million lines of Jovial code and assembly language that was first installed in 1972 and ported from IBM 9020 onto IBM 3083 computers, starting in 1985.
But Host has at most only 16MB of RAM, a serious limitation. And it badly needs replacing. (The ARTS computers in the Tracons are also severely limited in memory, but those are scheduled for replacement.) "The Host software is our biggest problem," a controller from Chicago told Spectrum. "There are so many patches, no one knows how it works. We can't change anything; no one dares touch it, because if we break it, we're gone."
In the mid-'80s, a multibillion dollar effort was started to update both the en route centers and the Tracons by replacing their displays and computers with networked workstations. (Airport towers use feeds from Tracon computers for radar tracking of airborne craft; they use separate surface-monitoring equipment for aircraft on the pavement.) That 10-year effort failed and has, for the most part, been abandoned. Called the Advanced Automation System, the program was sunk by unrealistic specifications and human factors difficulties, among other problems. New efforts to help controllers and pilots are under way, but have yet to make an impact on the present system. Here's the rest of the story from MIT
If you look in the latest Linux Journal though you'll see that Linux has made inroads in this area.
Strictly speaking, it qualifies as "old" since let's be real - Micosoft software hasn't changed much since the late Eighties.
...and still unsurpassed.
There's an Asteroids machine in this pizza place down the street, that count?
Banaaaana!
I still sometimes enter in the code for lunar lander on my 1975 HP-25 RPN calculator...
;)
That is the oldest software I support
~8^]
void main(){printf("Hello World!\n");}
The Integrated Data Retrieval System had been part of the American tax administration since the mid 60s. It's not 40 years old yet, but it probably will be before it is replaced.
It may not be just, but it is fair, and that is more important.
Contrary to what many slashdot readers seem to think, election coding is non-trivial, encompassing variations in laws and tradition in virtually every county of every state in the US. Since execution time is not an issue, and accuracy is, emulation and translation make lots of sense.
"Eve of Destruction", it's not just for old hippies anymore...
Man, my TRS-80 won't open PDFs. Damn you Adobe!!!
I'm not surprised they're failing if they're at least 1025 years old!!
Seriously, though, this is the kind of situation that really scares me. Rarely is such a problem solved with money alone -- a project of this scale and importance needs to be supported by the best.
The IT industry is characterised by too many enthusiasts and too few professionals.
NASA still runs software, to this day, from the 1960s due to funding cuts and that fact that it "still works," much of it on the same computers from the 1960s.
In fact, most of this software is so old it actually can no longer be maintained because the people who wrote it are DEAD, and modern programmers who replaced the retirees can't make heads or tails of all the spaghetti code within. There's all kinds of fascinating data from the golden age of space exploration that we could still use, but it's in proprietary, decayed backup formats in proprietary structures.
If they started using Linux and open standards now, though, 30-40 years from now, they won't be having this problem, as Linux will still be around then -- and the rest will be in the dustbin of history.
30 years is a long time for a software project to evolve. The question, however, is how much of the original code remains today. Lots of software, especially stuff that changes fast, is this way - I'm sure that not much of the Linux 0.01 code remains in the 2.6.0 tree. It's just a matter of replacing things one piece at a time (or completely rewriting things, in some cases).
has got to loom large in the discussion.
If only the text editor in that operating system had friendlier keyboard shortcuts...
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
IBM mainframe operating systems have been around since the mid 1960s and are still being supported and updated. VM, first called CP/67, then VM/370, then VM/SP, then VM/ESA and now zVM has been around since 1967. Some such as DOS (1965?) are even older but I mentioned VM since its my favourite :-)
The software may not have changed much, but the support sure has. If you are a corporation, and you make an operating system, that's the OS, what's needed for the computer to run applications, there is no excuse for dropping support for it. Ever.
Yes, I know of places where Windows 3.1 is still used (legacy database anyone?), and problems still arise. Even in 2003, I have troubleshot Windows 98, 95 and 3.1. And I'm not trying to be all high and mighty about Open Source, RedHat is putting their customers through the same bullshit.
To make the all too common analogy, if you have a car, and 5 years from now it breaks down, you bring it to a mechanic, he says "sorry, this model isn't supported anymore, time to upgrade!", what the hell do you say to that? The problem of software companies to stop supporting their products is ridiculous. If you're going to make something, do it right, don't pussyfoot around making a good product, and at least have the balls to admit to your mistake and fix it when the shit jumps off. Screw you all software engineers. Where the hell is my abacus?
However, I believe that a version of IBM's DITTO was available on System/360 in 1965. I've not been able to confirm this, though.
That's a terrible analogy. If your car breaks down five years after you bought it, and you return it to the dealer, do you know what he's going to say? "You only have a five-year warranty on parts and labor. Go find a mechanic." The mechanic is much more akin to service-oriented companies like Progeny who are offering commercial support for products that have been EOLed.
Strictly speaking, it qualifies as "old" since let's be real - Micosoft software hasn't changed much since the late Eighties.
Sure it has! They have changed "edit" "options" to "view options" in the pull down menus. Win95 there was a "find" fuction that has since changed to "search" however f is still the hot key for it. And the names of their products have changed as well. Windows explorer, Internet explorer, Microsoft Messenger, Windows Messenger. Lots and lots of changes.
Microsoft - Now where did my documents go today?
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
I went to an interesting conference by a guy named Phillipe Krouchten from Rational (or should I say IBM Rational now?) who was heading their Vancouver division studying software engineering stuff. From my understanding he is the father of the RUP (Rational Unified Process).
Canada basicly had the same problem as the US with an aging air traffic control system and basicly at the same time they started doing mostly the same thing. And a few years later they discovered that they where not advancing much, so they called in that guy who at the time worked as a consultant and he is supposed to have basicly turned aroudn the whole project and completed it..
Anyways, the interesing point of his conference was on iterative VS waterfall processes. At first everyone though that the "waterfall" approach was right. First write a good specification, then code, then test, then release.. But it was discovered that it didnt work. So Kruchten basicly transformed the project to use iterative techniques were they would go over 3 months of specify, code, test, and they do it again until the project was completed...
The part that I dont understand was... Why arent americans buying the Canadian system?
This wonderful old operating system was introduced in 1967. It's still around and still supported as far as I know. It grew out of Project MAX as did Unix and Multix.
In terms of the oldest supported computer, the abacus far outstrips any modern programmed computer's support, having existed for thousands of years. Is there any chance that a piece of software could be written that would be supported in functionality and design for that long? Any thoughts on that?
stuff |
FORTRAN is perhaps not the oldest supported software of all but it pre-dates Unix, McIDAS and ARTS and is still widely used and supported today. Some common utilities, widely used today, were adapted and used in the first Unix. Research for all this dates back to the early 60's.
Is there anything from the 50's or earlier that is still supported today? Surely someone at IBM must know...
Lots of software is still in use every day. The algorithms anyways. Quicksort was from the 60's, the numerous algorithms Dijkstra gave us. Many, many more as well.
"If you are a dreamer, a wisher, a liar, A hope-er, a pray-er, a magic bean buyer
To make the all too common analogy, if you have a car, and 5 years from now it breaks down, you bring it to a mechanic, he says "sorry, this model isn't supported anymore, time to upgrade!", what the hell do you say to that?
It depends on what you mean by break down. If you're talking routine maintance that would suck. If you are talking about a major failure such as an engine or transmission then it would be wise to evaluate the cost of a new car, cost of a used car, vs the cost of fixing the old car. In my case, I have a 1998 nissan sentra, were I believe it blue books for about $4500 with a trade in value of $3000. A good mechanic would take this into account.
But as far as cars vs computers go, every year is equilivent to 10 years in cars. Basided on this logic a good mechanic wouldn't waste their time, "dude it's not worth it, time to buy another one". You can either accept that answer, or reject it if you really love that specific car.
Computers are little diffrent. When the cost of supporting older stuff gets too high, a wise person considers an upgrade or replacement. However, I take STRONG exception to cases where the software is still good, useful, but the company folded and the copyrights are owned by some back somewhere who couldn't care less about actually looking into selling the rights to it resulting in the problem of can't buy nessicary addon cause no one sell it.
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
Right here
Xenon, where's my money? -Borno
Insurance Companies are still running mainframe systems to track your annuities and policies that have been under active development and support since the 1960's.
Systems like lifecomm, all writen in assembly are still worked on.
-L
Old truckers never die, they just get a new peterbilt
I don't know what point you're trying to make about MS software. MS DOS, Win 3.x, Win 95, and NT Workstation 3.x stopped being supported by Microsoft 11 days shy of 2 years ago. NT Workstation 4.x stopped being supported in June of this year, and Windows 98 enters it's non supported phase in approximately three weeks.
Don't play this holier than thou, " there is no excuse for dropping support for it. Ever." game. Software (especially operating systems) get EOS'd and EOL'd for good reasons. They're depreciated. The staff familiar with them has long since learned that they hate doing support and that even picking up trash is better than that (as I'm on the brink of discovering). Eventually people in a position of support (either by their own or their team lead's volition, possibly even by company policy) need to put their foot down and let people know that certain technologies can't be dealt with anymore.
To address your comparision to a car, let me put it this way...
If i were to buy a brand new Kia Rio and in 5 years it breaks down, chances are I WOULD look at a new car. Same idea, if your copy of Windows 95 you got as a bargain deal is causing problem that newer software is documented to solve (or at least still supported) then you're getting a steal.
I remember first using one ca. 1986. Up until that point most weather data was still distributed via fax. Having the ability to loop satellite imagery and make custom graphics with real-time data was somewhat revolutionary.
Canada started working on its replacements long after the FAA but it looks like we'll get there sooner. Like the FAA, we initially contracted a system called CAATS that would have done most of the things proposed by AAS. Somewhere in the mid-90's it became obvious that the proposal was pie-in-the-sky and the contractors would never be able to deliver -- every time the players sat down to review the situation they ended up reducing the goals of the project and delaying the acceptance date. Since the existing systems were starting to fall apart we switched to off-the-shelf systems (HP Unix boxes with Sony 2kx2k displays) running software that emulated the old vector tube displays. The main computers were essentially unaware that they were talking to modern hardware. The privatized ATC system also started rewriting the host software to run under Unix, and will be replacing the old hardware in 2004-2005. At that point we will have a new host emulating an old host, talking to new displays emulating old displays. Once a bug-for-bug clone is operational, we will be able to look at modernizing the software to take advantage of the increased computing power available. The original CAATS project has been scaled back to the point where it's little more than a shim layer that manipulates data passing between the host and the displays.
The British have already purchased a few ATC support systems from Canada and are considering more of them. Since they are running on similar hardware, there's a good chance that we will see common software running on both sides of the Atlantic by the end of the decade.
The FAA has looked at some of our systems. As the parent post said, however, they no longer know how their own system works and are terrified at the prospect of changing just a portion lest the whole house of cards falls down.
BTW, with reference to the topic at hand, we are just now replacing our 30-year-old ATC weather system. The original OIDS system ran on an Interdata-70 system with core storage and tape I/O. The only significant changes in the last 30 years was the switch to TTL memory and the addition of a floppy controller (that simulates a tape device). We still boot the machine using the binary switches on the front panel.... The replacement system runs on a network of NT4 machines and has been installed at about half of our facilities. I'm hoping the old system is donated to a computer museum.
They asked me to rewrite a piece of production software, so I did. Done, let's move on.
A year later, they asked me to rework it.
Done, let's move on.
3 years later, I was still working on the software--adding functions, changing screens, etc.
I left the company, and hired on with a consulting firm.
2 Years later, they call me back to help with a validation of...you guessed it!
5 Years after that, they called my boss. We're halfway through a rewrite, and we need help. Hello...who do we have that can do this? Yup.
After I die, these fuckers are going to hold a seance and ask my ghost to rewrite this app!
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, it doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick
You guys have more airports and more aircraft but also more sectors and more controllers. The net effect is that the number of flights handled at any one display is roughly constant (and limited by human capabilities).
The real reason the FAA isn't using the Canadian solution is that it's not complete. As I mentioned elsewhere in this thread, we are replacing systems one component at a time using emulation on modern hardware. Our components aren't interchangeable with your components due to differences in system architecture. They might do well to consider following our approach to the problem, but I doubt the resulting systems will ever converge.
...DATACRAFT? Wow, did that bring back memories. However, I suddenly realized that more than coincidence was at work, when I went to the McIDAS website and saw the "Dayton Street, Madison" address.
The University of Wisconsin, circa the late seventies, was a hotbed of Datacraft users. I believe it was Geophysics that pioneered their use with a Datacraft 6024/3. They introduced the cheaper 6024/5 at about the same time Digital came out with, IIRC, the PDP-11/20.
Departments at UW that needed minicomputers in the $50,000 class started buying Datacrafts right and left. Digital lost a lot of sales selling PDP-11's against Datacrafts. But the price/performance comparison, at that time and place, was really compellingly in favor of Datacraft.
Datacraft was headquartered in Fort Lauderdale, and I believe a lot of its engineering staff consisted of Cuban emigres. The Datacraft machines were 24 bits versus Digital's 16. I forget how many bits were in the mantissa and exponent, but there was a very usable 24-bit floating-point format. The instruction set was well designed for doing floating point without a dedicated processor (though a dedicated FPU was available). One of the things that sold us on the Datacraft was that without an FPU, the Datacraft's times for floating point add, subtract, multiply, and divide were all less than forty microseconds; the comparable times for Digital was about a millisecond.
The Datacraft had a hardware square root function.
The instruction set was the most godawful asymmetrical mess I've ever seen. If you were used to the elegant orthogonality of, say, a PDP-8, a Datacraft was a bit of a shock. (It made even a 6502 look pretty). Most instructions took a 15-bit address, and the natural address space was limited to 32K (of 24-bit words). However, in order to win some bid that required 65K, they had shoehorned in a few instructions that accepted a 16-bit address. This meant that when working in an address space of more than 32K, the linker (and compiler) had to keep track of an incredible number of linkage flavors, and probably about half the bugs reported had to do with things that happened when you crossed the 32K boundary.
There were three sort-of-index registers, named I, J, and K (if you used the variables I, J, and K in a FORTRAN program they were automatically assigned to the index registers). They were all slightly specialized, though. I don't remember what each of them did, but there were some instructions in which the I register, and only the I register had some special role, and ditto for J and K.
There was a 3-bit index register field, and most of the instructions that moved data into or out of index registers used the field to specify the register. That meant, of course, that those instructions could NOT themselves perform indexed addressing.
A very cool feature was an instruction that swapped the contents of a register and memory in a single cycle. The same architectural feature that enabled this also enabled another cool feature: there were functions that simultaneously set a word to all zeros or all ones and set the condition register to reflect the previous contents of the word. That is, a single instruction could you whether a word was zero or nonzero at the same time as it set it to zero.
Generally speaking--if there was anything general about the architecture, which I doubt--you could, at the binary level, specify more than one index register, which resulted in storage into all of the specified registers if it was a store instruction or loading the OR of the contents of the specified register if it was a load instruction. This resulted in a lot of possible instructions for which there were no assembler mnemonics defined. (And the assembler syntax was IBM-style card-oriented, with a single mnemonic going in a specified set of columns--you couldn't just OR the mnemonics themselves). Some of these instructions were actually useful, and there was always controversy, never quite resolved by Datacraft, as t
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
There has been a lot done to upgrade the Terminal software in the last 8 years and continues to be updated. Since the FDADs at the New York TRACON were failing they were updated with a new color displayed called an ARTS Color Display:
http://www.lockheedmartin.com/tss/products_service s/services/services6.html
The old ARTS computer in some of the TRACONs now have been updated with the new off the shelf hardware and software that was converted from the old software that ran on the IOPs. This system which is called Common ARTS is installed in about over 131 (the web site says 131 but I know it is more since Ive worked on the system):
http://www.lockheedmartin.com/tss/products_service s/services/services5.html
To give credit to all the controller and the ARTS systems out there were responsible for getting every plane over the United States on the ground safely after 9/11. I think that is testament to the reliability of the software that was created so long ago.
Here are a few more press releases Lockheed has done about the updating of the terminal system:
http://www.lockheedmartin.com/wms/findPage.do?dsp= fec&ci=11908&rsbci=0&fti=0&ti=0&sc=400
http://www.lockheedmartin.com/wms/findPage.do?dsp= fec&ci=12645&rsbci=0&fti=0&ti=0&sc=400
And one more on the competition going on between Common ARTS and STARS:
http://www.lockheedmartin.com/wms/findPage.do?dsp= fec&ci=12903&rsbci=0&fti=0&ti=0&sc=400
IBM IMS is over 35 years old (the first version dates from August 14, 1968, the same day Halle Berry was born). It's still supported.
IBM's First OS for the 16k IBM 360 model 30 in 1964 was DOS. DOS evolved to DOS/VS release 34 by 1968. DOS/VS release 34 is still supported and runs on several hundred systems. The LAST bug in DOS/VS r34 was fixed in 1980.
does MS Solitare count? It has survived (pretty much unchanged) through Win3.x, 95, 98, ME, 2000 and XP.
$cat
It can be very expensive and risky to replace the old systems. Many organizations just don't have the money to replace their older systems. You may not have all of the original/current source code. The written requirements, if any are still available, are hopelessly out-of-date and useless. As soon as a proposal for a replacement is floated, gnomes will come out of the woodwork with endless lists of new features and buzzwords that they want in the new system. The Microsoft zombies will insist that you only use Microsoft products, no matter how ill-suited they are for the application. The whole thing can rapidly turn into an expensive disaster that never works properly.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
MERLIN, the DEA's intelligence database has been around for a long time (I know the '70s and maybe the '60s). I don't know if it's running under all new code but it's always been a beast.
"And a voice was screaming: 'Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals?'" - HST
You mean back before the big guy said they could eat from any tree in the garden except that particular one? 'Cause I don't think that just telling them has ever worked since.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
I worked for Haddock Computer Center (seems to be down) in Wichita, KS for a short time when I was in college. The owner, Richard Haddock, was a programmer from the 60s or 70s (I'm not sure when exactly). He wrote some sort of accounting software or management software for oil companies. It ran on some ancient computer system that I can't recall off the top of my head. I remember sitting in the back room one day eating my lunch. I was kicked back in a chair with my feet up on some big box. My Burger King lunch (I remember that detail) was laid out on top of that box. Richard's father came into the back and we got to talking while I ate. He told me how Richard got his start. Then he said something about that computer right there was what Richard used. He was referring to the really big box I had my feet on and my lunch on. I hadn't noticed that it was a computer system. I thought it was a generator or ancient telco pedestal. It was some honkin' big computer system that Richard kept on hand just in case one of the companies that ran his ancient software went down and needed a quick recovery. Ie, he was still providing some level of support for his oil field software. I thought that was neat.
Just try building Perl 2.8.2 on cygwin.
Frankly, I don't see how it builds anywhere, but some machines must be ignoring the unterminated string buried somewhere in the B extension makefile...if that's really where it is...it's what Make says...
I worked on McIDAS around 1980-1982. It ran on a Harris minicomputer and the OS was named VULCAN (IIRC). I had it downloading weather and satellite maps to a Apple ][. The Mount St Helens eruption was visible on it.
I have worked on "Host" or NAS as it is formally known (National Airspace System) in the UK. (so yes I know Jovial and BAL assembler). Its REALLY fun programming with nearly every variable being global, using hollerith instead of ascii, and being limited to 7 characters for variable names, and missing many basic programming constructs (no while loop for example). Jovial's memory overlaying techiques were ahead of its time though, and is probably the reason these old systems have been able to keep up performance. We inherited the system from the US buy purchasing the 9020 (or rather its forerunner) and getting the software thrown in for free!. Today NAS still handles the entire UK airspace (including the very busy london sectors).
The approach in the UK is quite different to the States though, we do do changes to the system on a regular basis to improve ATC, and have extra features like automatic DMing, better radar tracking, and recently a way to get rid of PVD in place of a spanking new display system based at Swanwick. The approach in the US i believe has been to build peripheral systems around NAS leaving NAS untouched in the main (I would have thought this was more risky!). Alot of my friends got head hunted to go over to the states in order to make changes to NAS over there due to the high level of competence and knowledge of NAS in the UK, sometimes I wish I would have gone too
I don't agree with your assertion that 16MB of RAM as a limitation with NAS though, most ATC tasks are IO bound, things like printing strips, coordinating with adjacent centres and the like. The biggest problem with NAS is even though it is hardware redundant, it is possible to get a complete loss of processing if the internal memory structures are corrupted somehow, the system will restart on the redundant processor but load in the already corrupt memory structures - oops. I think NAS outdates PVD and should be considered one of the oldest surviving pieces of fully maintained software in the world.
There is nothing like the feeling of reading code and comments that was *written before you were born!*
Not really, I just make a distinction between obsolescence and wearing out. Obsolescence is a condition of having a functionality that is no longer useful, while worn out is a failure to perform a function (useful or not).
Now, with that defined, I can still see your point to the extent that worn out and obsolete are both in the broader category of things that are now useless.
However, unlike worn out which can be fixed by buying exactly what you had before, obsolete can only be solved by buying something different (possibly just a later version of the same software, but nevertheless different.). The costs of providing the old version with new drivers is prohibitive. It can be done but since the number of customers who would have any interest in it could be counted on one hand, they'd have to pay thousands each (and commit to that up front) just to break even.
There are customers and products where that sort of thing does make sense. It's not that uncommon on mainframes. Of course, if you're a mainframe user, you paid (and still pay) mainframe prices that make that sort of thing worthwhile.
The other option is Free Software where as long as there is a community of users for a version, there can be upgrades. Even there, obsolescence creeps in. I'm sure it wouldn't be too hard to get a gig ether driver into Linux kernel 2.0.x, but the performance would be terrible, so there is little interest in that. To get decent performance, the whold network stack would need to be updated, so upgrade to 2.4.x and be happy.