Living Fossils: Old Tech That Just Won't Die

jfruh writes "You might think that flat files, VAXen, and punch card readers are things of the past — and you're right, for the most part. But here and there, these fossilized technologies have found places where they can survive in production use."

Comments

Technology

[girlintraining]

I've never understood why people think that just because something is newer makes it better. We may mostly be on high speed internet connections running through cable, or xDSL, wireless, or other technologies, but that doesn't mean the forerunner to those technologies are without purpose anymore. Modems are still used in ATMs because landlines are incredibly cheap to install and not a lot of data needs to be exchanged. Same thing with fax machines; Despite scanners and e-mail, many courthouses won't accept scanned documents -- but they will accept faxed documents. Amusingly, most of those fax machines are paired to document management systems that convert them back into digital files (ie, PDFs) for processing. The reason for this is not immediately obvious: Many jurisdictions have laws stating a faxed copy of a document is legally the same as the original, but lack similar laws saying a digitally signed or submitted document is valid.

The list goes on. So don't just assume a technology should be sunset because of technical reasons -- there are often human factors to consider as well.

Re:Technology

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, I've found that people are more likely to be the opposite. They see something new, and they say...well, the old way was better. Old cars, because they hate all these fancy engines that they can't just fix, old televisions because they can't stand those black bars, old light bulbs because those curly ones are too hard to understand.

Too many people assume everything should be frozen at a point in time, because of well, some human factor that results in a resistance to any change or improvement.

Because it might not be perfect, but the old ways, they WERE better.

Don't get me started on the people who think that they're hearing about more murders and killings today, so it must be more than it was back when they were young! Even if you produce statistics showing the opposite, or if you point out the numerous children who survive because of modern medicine, or anything else that shows it's not all bad.

Re:Technology

[TWX]

I used to work on an Alphanumeric paging system. We used 2400 baud because the time necessary to negotiate a higher-speed connection was far longer than the time to negotiate and then transmit ~240 characters at 2400 baud.

Fast forward to 2001 or so, and the general decline of paging. We were attempting to migrate from physical serial port expanders connected to physical modems, connected to a breakout cable from a T1 CSU/DSU, and we tried Equinox digital modem emulators- that integrated a single connection to a T1 CSU/DSU without all of the physical. The problem was the the Equinox gear wouldn't reliably negotiate that slow, and often would lock up the virtual serial port, rendering it useless until the card was reinitialized through a cold reboot. Equinox was more interested in giving us our money back than they were in fixing their hardware, but we did finally manage to convince them, after much effort, to put work into fixing it.

Re:Technology

[qu33ksilver]

Absolutely, never forget your roots. We would be fools to discard our past because that's what led us to where we are now.

Re:Technology

[NotBorg]

I'll take stainless steel and cast iron over teflon any day for my cooking needs. I mow my lawn without gas or electricity. I think that puppets in '80s movies feel more real than the most advanced computer animated crap of today. I'll be damned if I purchase music that isn't on a CD. DVDs are just fine for movies (I migrated from tape for good reason but blue ray simply isn't worth the hoopla). I still don't give a flying fuck about 3D... in fact I prefer movies that are not be in 3D. I look for yard sales in senior communities because I know that that those 50-year-old cooking utensils are still going to out last that stuff at Walmart.

Yada yada get off my lawn, but I'll be damned if I'll run anything less than the most recent kernel and gcc.

Re:Technology

[BenJCarter]

The flatfile, like the flatworm, will likely survive eons of evolution...

XML FTW!

Re:Technology

[Joce640k]

EDI can be embedded in XML before storing it in your SQL database. I'm sure there's a Java library for doing this.

Re:Technology

[YttriumOxide]

I get annoyed when people just jump straight to making a database for everything. Sometimes flat files are just a better option, so long as you don't need to run any searches.

Absolutely agreed. My day job is writing software and if I'm storing data that I know will never exceed a few MB at absolute most, has no requirements for search, and is a fairly simple structure; I FAR prefer to use CSV to any kind of database.

The best example is a single application translation table for around 25 languages. 100 strings, 25 languages - it may in theory grow up to 50 languages or so eventually and if the app gets much bigger, up to 200 strings. 200*50 = 10000 strings. At an average of around 15 bytes per string, that's ~150KB of data.

As a UTF-8 CSV text file, I can hand edit it in a run of the mill text editor; loading it in the application takes milliseconds of application startup time (at which point the whole thing sits in memory while the application runs, so it doesn't re-read it again); parsing it is trivial; and any errors introduced somehow aren't going to kill the whole file (perhaps just make one string wrong; or at worst corrupt one language (a single line of the file)). I can't count count the number of times people have told me to convert this to a SQLite database "because it's better"... very sad.

Hardly obsolete.

[Lord Kano]

I can speak from first hand knowledge that many Fortune 500 companies are using technology that most people think of as obsolete. If you paid $50k for a software package that was written for VAX OpenVMS and the publisher went out of business 15 years ago, what would you do? You'd do the same thing these guys do. Work on getting a replacement, and keep that replacement in the wings until you can no longer run the existing (perfectly working) package.

In 2009, I worked on porting a fairly lengthy program from VAX to Alpha in OpenVMS Fortran. Why? Because it took 20 years to get the program just right and it works perfectly for the suited task. Why throw away a perfectly functional program just because the VAX is dying?

Today, companies are producing good and providing services that touch all of our lives using 30+ year old technology.

LK

Flat Files FTW!

[wrook]

Developers who think that *everything* needs to be in a database scare the crap out of me. Sometimes flat files are a really good idea. Sometimes putting something in a human readable form that can be viewed and edited with a normal text editor is a really good idea. There are many, many things where I don't need to search vast amounts of data, where I don't need atomic commits, where I don't need rollback, etc, etc. For those things I use a flat file.

Admitedly, I know the difference between regular, context free and context sensitive grammars and I know how to write a parser. Unfortunately, this isn't always common knowledge in a software team :-P

Re:Flat Files FTW!

[wvmarle]

I would write a data reader/writer module for the program.

This would handle the data storage, and if later requirements change it's a relatively small part of the program that changes. The rest of the program doesn't have to care how it's stored externally: it just cares about having function calls available to do a read, write, maybe search. This makes it also relatively easy to expand.

And when in future there is a need for say more sophisticated search options, you can rewrite that one module so it starts to interact with a MySQL or Postgres database or so. Even the data format conversion becomes a breeze that way as all you do is read from the old system and write to the new system.

Further in the future maybe your external db goes out of business, and again it's a relatively easy change to a new db.

IE6

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought this was going to be about IE6

Re:Vaxes

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

I also go back that far, and I believe it's an anachronism. We called them VAXes back then, not VANen. They *xen meme smells more 1990s than 1970s

Here are about 25 usenet posts from 1981 that use the term VAXen.

But even if there were some were calling them VAXen back then it's still wrong. It's just bad English.

My high-school english teacher, who was awarded state english teacher of the year on more than one occasion, taught his classes that "Language creates environment and environment creates language" - in other words, correct usage is defined by nothing more than whatever enough people say is the correct usage. And we had a cluster of microvaxen at my high-school too.