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Texas Company's Antique Computers Are For Production, Not Display
concealment writes "Sparkler Filters up north in Conroe [Texas] still uses an IBM 402 in conjunction with a Model 129 key punch – with the punch cards and all – to do company accounting work and inventory. The company makes industrial filters for chemical plants and grease traps. Lutricia Wood is the head accountant at Sparkler and the data processing manager. She went to business school over 40 years ago in Houston, and started at Sparkler in 1973. Back then punch cards were still somewhat state of the art."
See kottke.org for an eye-popping view of one of the "programs" — imagine debugging that.
"THAT", (a wired board), is vastly easier to debug than any modern software. In fact a trainee can usually debug it by trial an error in just a few minutes.
Now get off my digital lawn whipersnapper!
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
"If it ain't broke, don't replace it. Even if replacing it would lead to a 3 fold increase in employee productivity."
"Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much." - Oscar Wilde
The problem with that can end up being "when it is broke, how are you going to fix it?"
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
OK, I get it, Sparkler hates trees. But the insanity of someone protecting their job by never updating technology is just amazing. I would love to see what they have spent on maintenance over the years for that electromechanical junk. And I really wonder where they are getting punch cards. Can you even get them any more, or are they having a printer make custom batches for them? And, of course, there is no really useable backup of all of the company's data for when the inevitable final failure hits. For less than the cost of their next punch card order they could be on a modern system with performance and good data backup. But then I guess that Lutricia Wood might be concerned that others might be able to do thing that only the high priestess of data systems does now. Good thing that she will live forever and never retire, otherwise Sparkler would be in a very bad position.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
I mostly agree with you, but I've also been on a couple of projects trying to replace 30+ year old custom-built mainframe applications.
I've seen a couple where people try to replace it with more modern software, but nothing which isn't built from scratch can even come close. It usually lacks 30-40 years of tweaks and fixes to do everything they need, often completely changes the workflow, and opens up vast amounts of data transformation you need to do to pull in all of the legacy data into the new system.
I've seen several of these projects fail after a significant amount of time and money was sunk into it as people realized it wasn't possible to build something which did all of the same things.
Sometimes, no matter how hard you try, it can be an exceedingly expensive thing to replace old systems like that. So much so that it isn't feasible for companies to really undertake it.
However, that just pushes out the problem, and sooner or later, you end up with a defunct system and no replacement.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
One critical irreplaceable part breaks, and they can no longer process payroll or inventory.
All because they don't want to hire somebody to spend a week or two to replace the functionality of that obscene waste of energy with a simple spreadsheet. The simple value of data security, not to mention the inter-operability between the data generated and things like, I dunno... check printing and direct deposit, for example, seems obvious.
I'd also guess there would be a lot less work for their accounting department. Either they could save the expense of one or two peoples' salaries, or at least spread the workload savings among the staff. In any event, it simply doesn't make sense not to modernize it.
Why aren't these posts deleted?
And, with legacy systems, the problem is you can do a huge amount of analysis and specifications -- and still end up having no idea how the system works for all of those corner cases nobody ever mentioned and which can't be shoe horned into what you've now got.
On one of the projects I was on, at the beginning we did the analysis, and asked them a bunch of questions on how it worked and what the constraints were. We got told thinks like "This can never happen, this is always true, this is always structured like that".
So you build a system which takes the concrete assumptions they've given you, and then get farther into the process when it suddenly becomes "well, sometimes they can look like this but not always, sometimes that isn't true either, and in a few cases it's entirely different from everything else".
Then you can quickly discover what you've spent a year building can't possibly work, because in some cases, 1+1 really does equal sqrt(67.89), and you can't make that fit anything you've built since there wasn't supposed to be any real numbers (or whatever metaphor works for you).
Often because what the company wants is to start with is screen mock-ups because they're focused on the new UI, and it's not until you get deep into the ugly bits that you realize half of what they told you about the actual process is blatantly wrong.
Sadly, the complexity of system that old can be beyond anything that can be conveyed, or even fully known by the people who own it. And the more specialized the software domain, the more you're likely to find all sorts of things like that.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
And what happens when the lady that's running this system dies of a heart attack and the only people that even know how to use one of these computers are all retired and senile?
It's not just the machine costs, the retraining. It's what happens if the only person who truly understands the system gets hit by a bus. The hit by a bus scenario is often overlooked in small businesses. You don't just need to be able to replace the system and hardware, you need to be able to replace the people running it, without advance notice.
change for the sake of change. Let me say up front that i've worked in IT for over 15 years. Mostly as a DBA but I did network admin, hardware, development and OS.
I keep hearing how the next version will do X, save Y amount of time and Z money. Won't require as many people to maintain it, etc. Yet it never seems to be the case. Vendors keep us on a continuous upgrade cycle because bug fixes aren't back ported or to get the latest security patches, etc. Managers, architects seem to focus more on resume building than a stable environment.
I can't get any commitment for maintaining production but if i'm an hour late on a project task i'll have an army standing in my cubicle harassing me. I constantly hear developers wanting to go back to the basics because the new piece of software that's supposed to make their life easier isn't as stable.
Yes, I love to play with the latest and greatest features but i'm not sure if from the companies perspective if its always worth the money. I have to say working in IT support can be a very frustrating and stressful job.
"Thanks to the remote control I have the attention span of a gerbil."