Slashdot Mirror
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.
Hackers probably couldn't even find a manual for one.
How many modern systems can anybody imagine still working and apparently doing what we need them to 40 years from now?
My money is on this VME system being around for another 20 years while the mess of Java and Oracle(you know they're going to use Oracle). It'll be overpriced, late and won't actually work.
Just because something is old, doesn't mean it needs replaced. In short, why not just upgrade the mainframe?
If so, why fix it? What are the tangible benefite of a new system?
Many people are shocked that computers/systems for 20 years still run, but is says a few things:
1. That people are used to crap code that can't keep running.
2. That people are used to crap products that can't last for more than a couple of years.
If it ain't broke, why fix it? They sent man to the moon on less CPU horsepower than my Nexus 6. Voyager has been running for more than 35 years in the harshness of space.
Fight Spammers!
John Titor... Please report to... Oh, nevermind. Some bloke in a blue callbox has already claimed it.
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....
Port it to minecraft. There seems to be some good 1970's CS work happening there.
Many people are shocked that computers/systems for 20 years still run,
Only people who don't know much. It's not shocking that such a thing would happen or that hardware can be made that robust. What IS shocking is that people put systems in place without any thought whatsoever to what people might want to do 20 years later. Seriously do you REALLY think it will be efficient or practical without problems for you to use the PC you are reading this on today in 20 years? Why would it be any different for a business or government?
If it ain't broke, why fix it?
Because it probably IS broken in a multitude of ways. Just because it can get a specific job done doesn't mean it does so efficiently or without problems. I've driven a lot of beater automobiles over the years and while they usually got me from point A to point B they were unquestionably broken if a number of ways. I have PCs that are 10-15 years old here in my company doing specific jobs and they definitely have problems. Yes we still get some productive work out of them but that doesn't mean I shouldn't think about replacing them when I can.
They sent man to the moon on less CPU horsepower than my Nexus 6.
Because that is all they had at the time. Nobody would even dream of doing that way today because we have better options now. Why limit yourself to yesterday's technology if you have a choice?
Voyager has been running for more than 35 years in the harshness of space.
Which is relevant how? You're comparing a spacecraft that human eyes will never see again with a earthbound computer system that we can modify or replace any time we want.
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.
Listen up, Junior ...
In some ways, Token Ring was very much superior to Ethernet. A hospital I worked for in the late 90's had a huge (1000 nodes) 4Mbps TR, all as one big subnet, built long before switches came along. If you tried to do that with Ethernet, it would have crashed and burned in a week. This was, on the whole, pretty reliable (if slow). The downside was that if one card in the ring failed, the whole thing would generally die. So it was great until the 10 year old TR cards started failing regularly due to capacitors failing. We ended up replacing the whole thing with 100Mbps switched ethernet, which wasn't really noticeably faster despite a 25-fold increase in nominal bandwidth, and failed more often. :)
"He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1
If it's not broken, it gets the job done, it's vendor-supported, and you don't expect that support to end in the foreseeable future, then I don't see the problem.
Age alone is not any reason to declare technology obsolete.
Here's a common example: Stores still sell 4-function calculators for $5 or less. As far as the user is concerned, they are less-expensive versions of the same calculators you could buy from the mid-1980s on, and thinner-and-cheaper-with-LCD-and-button-battery versions of the kind you could buy in the 1970s. In other words, if you still have a 1985 four-function calculator and it's still working, it still meets your needs, and you can still get batteries for it, there's no reason to throw it out.
Heck, even the lowly manual typewriter is still better than a pencil, pen, electric typewriter, or computer+word processor+printer in certain situations. In others, the best choice is a pen or pencil.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
The California DMV has them beat, they are still using code installed on UNISYS mainframes in 1970 to run the DMV core applications.
It is as old as I am...
Never answer an anonymous letter. - Yogi Berra
It is a bus and connector specification.
"VME" can refer either to the VME operating system or the VMEbus.