UK Government Department Still Runs VME Operating System Installed In 1974

Qedward writes: The UK government's Department for Work and Pensions is on the hunt for a new £135,000-a-year CTO, with part of their annual budget of £1 billion and responsibility for DWP's "digital transformation" to oversee the migration of the department's legacy systems which are still run on Fujitsu mainframes using the VME operating system installed in 1974.

Comments

Modern Technology

[Galaga88]

How many modern systems can anybody imagine still working and apparently doing what we need them to 40 years from now?

Re:Modern Technology

[jbolden]

Give me what that system cost in 1974 inflation adjusted dollars and I'll be happy to flip out a modern system every year. Using cheap less durable components with redundancy is a better strategy. I live in a 1830s house so I get the advantages of good quality construction. But if I were building a house I'd use 2014 cheap materials.

Re:Modern Technology

[TheGratefulNet]

http://www.eevblog.com/forum/t...

nice old classic tek test gear. highly in demand by collectors and those who appreciate good old fashioned engineering and build quality. the last of the 'repairable' tek scopes, pretty much (and even this is borderline repairable, with many custom chips).

still, a few new caps, a new battery backed nvram module and you have another 20 or 30 yrs left on this scope.

search that same forum for other old test gear (power designs (brand) power supplies are also built like tanks and run forever. I have 4 of them at home in my lab and they date from the mid 50's to early 60's. still hold their precision and would cost $5k to $10k today if you could even buy them.

I have audio gear that I personally built in the 70's and 80's that still runs fine (hafler amps, etc).

today, its hard to find things built to last, but it USED to be the norm "before your mother was born", so to speak.

Re:Modern Technology

[gstoddart]

Well, it's the way I've always heard Russian engineering described ... in the absence of finesse or the assumption of a skilled operator, you build the heck out of it, like you said. Take all of your tolerances and double them just to be sure. If you don't know your tolerances, build it as heavy as you can manage.

The techniques used to build stuff out of stone had been learned over a very long period of human history, and was used to build stuff you expected to last forever.

Roman roads, or some Roman concrete structures have lasted far longer than any modern equivalent ... so much so that people are trying to figure out some of the process. Because the Romans made piers and bridges which still stand in salt water, and we really can't come close to that.

My guess, if humankind were wiped out tomorrow much of our engineering wouldn't last a hundred years, let a lone a thousand. And, in fairness, we build for different purposes and with different constraints.

I firmly believe that a tiny fraction of structures would last long enough to suggest a survivor bias ... in fact, I suspect long after the modern stuff had fallen apart some ancient stuff would still be standing.

Re:Modern Technology

[jeremyp]

Without knowing *why* the castle is gone, I have no idea what your point is.

Usually, if it was a stone castle, the building materials were robbed out to make new dwellings. The reason that people could do that is because the owners abandoned them as being shit places to live.

With buildings, as with other man made items, technology moves on. Generally speaking, a house built now will be more comfortable, easier to heat and more suited to modern life styles than a house built 50 years ago. Who cares if the old ones fall down? If you are going to knock it down and replace it with something better, money spent making it last a millennium is wasted money.

Re:old != bad

[Shinobi]

Nono, like other big IT projects in the UK, it will be using "the very latest in Agile know-how", and cost 3 times as much as any clusterfuck that involves Oracle, take 50% longer, and spread 300% more blame on "old fossiles"....

Disclaimer: Had to interface with a EU project under UK IT auspices last year.... Painful....

Does it still work?

[91degrees]

If so, why fix it? What are the tangible benefite of a new system?

Orange Leos?

[sysjkb]

I wonder if they are running "orange Leos"? Here's a post from alt.folklore.computers in 1998. Terribly impressive. I'm not sure his age estimate is necessarily accurate, though: the final incarnation of the Leo ceased to be manufactured in the latter half of the 60s, so it may be a bit younger.

From: Deryk Barker (dbarker@camosun.bc.nospam.ca)
Subject: Re: Multics
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers, alt.os.multics
Date: 1998/11/09

[...]

When my wife was working for Honeywell, in the 1980s, one of the
customers she had dealings with was British Telecom.

BT, at one location, had what they called the "orange Leos".

Now, for those who don't know this, the LEO was the world's first-ever
commercially-oriented machine (1951). Even more amazingly, the Lyons
Electronic Office was designed and built by the J Lyons company,
best-known as manufacturers of cakes and for their nationwide chain of
corner tea shops.

Anyway, an "orange Leo" was an ICL 2900 mainframe (they came in orange
cabinets), emulating an ICL 1900 mainframe, emulating a GEC System 4
mainframe emulating a LEO.

30+ year old executable code over 3 architecture changes....

Extreme example here, but...

[ErichTheRed]

Not all legacy stuff is bad. Not all legacy stuff should be kept around to the point where you can't find people to run it, however,

I've had experience working in die-hard IBM mainframe shops as well as places that used the HP MPE operating system on the HP 3000 minicomputer system. In the 3000 case, the customer was relying on a service provider that was providing an application that was way way way out of date but still worked. All the IBM places I've ever worked have been slowly "modernizing" their application stack, but in most cases, the core transaction processing has remained on the mainframe because that was the best solution. It's extremely rare these days to see an end user facing green screen application, but they do exist as well. (Yes, I work in "boring" old school industry sectors, very few web-framework-du-jour hipsters here, but we're also not old farts.)

The problem I've seen is that vendors love the fact that customers are locked in and will do nothing to encourage them to get off. Most ancient mainframe code can run virtually unmodified on newer hardware, and that backwards compatibility is a big selling point. It allows IBM to go in, swap out your entire hardware platform at $x million, and keep billing you by the MIPS without changing any code.

But...the reverse problem is that "mainframe migration" projects often end up becoming case studies of how Big Consulting Company X was paid hundreds of millions to not deliver a working system. I believe I read about DWP's "Universal Credit" project that has Accenture, IBM or Oracle written all over it. These kinds of projects usually try to port all the business logic and transaction processing to some horrible-to-maintain J2EE monstrosity backed by an Oracle database. They usually fail because (a) no one correctly estimates the work required to pull all that business logic out of 30+ years of cruft, and (b) the consulting companies replace their star team (that travels with the sales force) with new grads in India (who do the actual work.) I've seen this cycle over and over again, and am still amazed that CIOs aren't wary of consultants.