Slashdot Mirror
Join the Hunt For the Government's Oldest Computer (muckrock.com)
v3rgEz writes: As the saying goes, 'If it ain't broke, don't fix it.' If a machine is doing its job, reliably and without error, then common sense dictates that you just shouldn't mess with it. This is doubly true for computers and quadruply true for government computers. This lends itself to an obvious question: what's the government computer most in need of an upgrade? MuckRock has launched a new FOIA project to find out, and has already started receiving some interesting results.
According to the FAA, just knowing what kinds of computers the FAA is using would endanger the security of national air traffic. That's pretty bad, both for this project and my confidence in our air traffic system.After all, despite my vague wording, the FAA found 11 pages of documents responsive to the same request. But! They refused to release any of their records to me, citing the blanket Exemption 3 because they deemed, "disclosure would be detrimental to the safety of persons traveling in air transportation."
He does say in the article that some agencies have confirmed mainframes from circa 1970, but doesn't say which specifically. It should be interesting to see how this project goes over the next few months.
I'd be curious if he has a way to differentiate active, in-use machines vs. old stuff that may just still be in the inventory roles. I helped a bit with my previous company's effort to clear out old storage and inventory and there was some pretty old equipment that had been in the closet for close to a decade, plus some stuff in their inventory records that had long since disappeared.
So I wonder if that Gateway Liberty 2000 is actually still sitting on someone's desk where the toil away with WordPerfect and Windows 3.1 every day, or if it got tossed/walked out of the building in the late 90s and no one bothered to update the records.
They must have a. 360 running.
Despite the FAA claiming security concerns,, it took me 10 minutes to find Lora was once bidding on a contract to replace IBM. 9020Es, so they are probably running 360-compatible gear.
since this is the internet and I'm an AC, I'll go ahead and speculate that NASA refused because releasing their computer inventory would reveal their possession and use of all kinds of skynets, cyborgs, and other sci-fi sundries. FAA has some skynet-remote-terminals that it can't disclose either - national security, you know.
I get highly annoyed when i get an e-mail it takes me 15 minutes to find an answer to, i can imagine how the poor office drone who has to find all this frivolous information feels, especially when it's at the behest of somebody merely curious.
And that's assuming he can find it on his own, once he has to start bothering several different departments people tend to develop a deep resentment towards you...and trust me i know this from experience.
A couple of years ago I heard of a late-70's VAX still being used at a small power plant. To my knowledge it controlled some sort of HVAC systems. Another old system, one I've actually seen, was a mid-80's computer of unknown make/model used to control traffic lights in a small city. It's funny, or actually impressive, to see such old systems still in use. The old-school guys that keep them running tell nice stories about flea market and eBay scavenging.
-SR
On computers, there is no such thing as "ain't broke." That's the old way of thinking.
In 2016, when developers come to you and say "oh, you're still using last week's version of our app? That one was crap! Here, buy our new version." you dutifully obey, and Upgrade to the Latest Version(TM). It doesn't actually matter what the computer is used for or what the app does. This is the new way.
When a department gets downsized for one reason or another at my government job, the department manger is supposed to turn in all the unused workstations for redeployment or recycling. They typically don't. A favorite hiding space is the utility closet inside a women restroom. All the field techs are male. Go figure.
"If a machine is doing its job, reliably and without error, then common sense dictates that you just shouldn't mess with it."
"what's the government computer most in need of an upgrade?"
You've just given a great reason why some hardware is still in use, it works.
Why turn around and conclude that it needs an upgrade?
"knowing which agencies are running hardware older than I am is important"
Sure, for a very loose definition of important.
I've got boxes of vacuum tubes that could be available for the right price.
Just sayin'.
Have gnu, will travel.
The Central Logic Control Computer (CLC) at AN/FPQ-16 Perimeter Acquisition Radar Attack Characterization System (PARCS) was assembled at Los Alamos in 1968 and installed at Cavalier AFS sometime before 1972. It remains installed and operational - although a replacement computer system is now also installed. The CLC was probably the fastest computer in the world when it was built and may have still been the fastest computer in the world in the lat 1970s. It is compose of 40+ racks of water cooled equipment.
http://www.srmsc.org/par2010.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AN/FPQ-16_PARCS
I hate that goddamn phrase. When the inevitable time comes when suddenly the old system *does* break, it's no longer under any support, nobody's left at the company who knows how it works, there's no budget for a modern replacement, and it has to be fixed in four hours or the company goes bankrupt. Been there, done that, ate the T-shirt after hours of working with no break for food.
People who say "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" are the same idiots who brag about uptime.
Pro tip: *every* system is broken. The trick is being able to repair or work around the broken parts without disruption, not to just seal it behind a wall and rediscover it years later when trying to track down what's still pinging.
I use Macs for work, Linux for education, and Windows for cardplaying.
I've found that sometimes old systems leave footprints that last far beyond the computers themselves.
For example, a couple of years ago we had this working networked system that we wanted to upgrade one computer of. The issue was that the protocol used to talk between the systems was a custom network layer written on top of a serial protocol called DR-11W. The cards were rather hard to find, the hardware very finicky to get talking right, and finding good docs for our custom layer was a real challenge.
I eventually found out in researching it that DR-11W was in fact the serial printer port on the original PDP-11's back in the 70's. Neither machine was a PDP-11, but since every upgrade ever done was one computer at a time, we've had to maintain this PDP-11 printer port communications interface for the last 40 years. The protocol even required converting all floating-point values to IBM's old format even though neither side used that format! The conversion's not trivial either.
Our one vendor for these cards has since gone out of business. The story I heard is that they lost their building lease, and didn't feel like it was worth it to move. So it looks like next upgrade, the PDP-11 printer port networking may finally die.
The moral here is that just because the 40-year-old computer may be physically gone, it might not really be gone.
I believe they had to refurbish some old 60s era systems to reprocess some lunar mission data that recorded. It may even have been recorded on 7 track tape.
I used to run a pair hobbyist/enthusiast sites for fans of DEC's VAX and PDP-11 series of machines.
Shortly after 9/11, I got a phone call from someone at the Pentagon who was looking for certain parts so they could repair an older VAX that had been damaged in the attack. I was able to get them in touch with a third-party reseller who still had those bits in the back of a dusty warehouse.
It was surprising that they hadn't upgraded to Alpha (which had been out almost ten years) then; the telco where I worked had one big system that had gone through three company changes (DEC -> Compaq -> HP) and had been upgraded in-chassis from VAX to Alpha.
I think all large systems sold to the federal government are required to have service/support available for something like 5 to 10 years after final sale availability; can't find concrete details via Google.
There are lots of systems that were designed around embedded PDP-8s and PDP-11s. And given the numbers of Digital VAX sold and specialized software it would not be very surprising if some of these systems are still be used. There were probably over 1.5 million of these machines sold (about 300,000 PDP-8s, 700,000 PDP-11s, 500,000 VAX machines), so there's probably some happily humming away.
I'm sure the same is true for some earlier IBM 360/370, but they had a better upgrade path and were more expensive to start with. Most of those machines got replaced when they came off lease or the parts availability expired. But probably some of the software from the early 360's is still be used.
Those were the days when machines were rock solid (and weighed about as much). Unlike today, when electronics are designed to be replaced every two years or so.
Why are you doing this? What reason do you have? Processing an FOI request costs money, real money; and, it takes up someone's (usually several someones) time. if you're doing this "for fun" then you're wasting time and taxpayer's money.
I really don't know if NDAs involving high security clearance expire.
Anyway, once upon a time, when does not matter, I was working at a highly secure government data center. I became kind of buddy buddy with the grey beards in the control room overseeing the big iron. One day, one of them showed me something is a corner of the facility I had never had a reason to venture into. It was a VAX running VMS. Vacuum tubes and all. Funny looking thing, like a small refrigerator kinda sorta. Needless to say, I reached right out and put my hand on it for a good ten-seconds. When I asked what purpose it served, I was told no one was really sure. I thought he was joking. I later found out that in fact no one knew what it was doing if anything at all, so they just let it keep going. Weird.
While we had fun telling visitors to the labs that most of systems running Air Traffic Control were "essentially from the 60s and 70s" that's only technically correct.
The truth is the original HOST mainframes were replaced in the 80s, and then again in the 90s, and now being phased out for ERAM (which is built out of COTS PC parts). In some cases software was brought forward during upgrades, so it may have been possible you'd of been running some assembly code back from the Apollo era but not really. There were still some oddities, though (like the "units" of some fields being in 64ths of a nautical mile), that made interfacing with the ARTCC systems fun.
There might be some ARTS IIA terminals left? Those are vintage early '80s, but I think they've all been replaced with at least IIE or IIIE ('90s) and are all slated to become some form of STARS (late '90s) by 2020 or so.
Maxim: People cannot follow directions.
Increases in truth directly with the length of time spent explaining them
Vanguard 1 has been orbit for 57 years but is a derelict.
Pioneer 6 was launched 12/16/65 and may still be working, Pioneers 7 and 8 may also be working.
Voyagers 2 and 1 are still in contact.
The GOES 3 satellite was launched in 1978 and still functioning.
I'm relatively new here. I don't know how much latitude Timothy and others have in editing TFS.
Is Slashdot geared towards an international audience or a mainly-US audience?
US readers may take this for granted, but as an international reader I'd appreciate summaries like this making it clear that the article is talking about the US government.
The DEC manual for the DR11-W is here.
sites. Find your nearest land-based ICBM site and ask for a tour.
In my job the oldest I've seen is 12 years old in use. There were some beige boxes in storage that were likely 25 years old as well.
This was working for MWR under DOD
Reminds me of my first marriage. One night, after twenty years, I discovered that it was indeed broke. A light tap, and the whole thing shattered. The most solid things are often the most fragile. It is wiser to periodically evaluate your universe.
There are a lot of comments here that this FOIA request is a waste of time and money, all for "fun". But if you think about it, this information shouldn't have to be commanded or browbeaten out of millions of government employees. And if the government is operating the way it *should* be, then the gathering, processing and collating of this data should all be routed through a record so that -- voila -- anytime the government, itself, needs to know what it has on hand then it knows where exactly to look and in one place. This would be very handy if the government, itself, started to wonder if entire groups of machines and protocols needed immediate replacement or not. They could have a specialist go through all of this gathered inventory data and give them a realistic budget and timeline. With the data already on hand, that sort of project would be saved the time and effort it took to compile the data in the first place.
Now, on top of that, consider the four stated aims of the report:
* Find which departments are thrifty enough to keep machines in service long past their expiration.
-- how would this not serve as valuable information to the government if it's assessed and quantified in a way that's easy to understand and makes sense?
* Learn the technical dependencies that are holding back the effectiveness of public services.
-- again, how would this not be valuable information?
* Reveal security problems raised by departments that refuse to upgrade from unsupported, obsolete systems.
-- again!
* Critique the allocation and utilization of computer resources by the government
-- which doesn't offer as much usefulness as the other three points, really just generalizes the entire thing, but still there it is. How is this not valuable information?
"Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee
Whether it's the appeal to "common sense" or the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it".
People seem to think that software is forever. It isn't. It usually rots from the outside in as OS's are updated, peripherals are replaced, and other external factors kick in. To keep these dinosaurs running require more and more desperate measures as time passes (then again, we're talking government, where expensive solutions are considered just another day). Parts that haven't been made in decades wear out, people who know how it worked die off.
That's not even taking into account stuff like the higher power consumption, lower computing speed, more physical space required for discrete boxes and so forth.
We still have a sparcstation 10 running something somewhere (and by that I mean noone knows what it does anymore and we can only pinpoint its location down to somewhere in a regional office)
> And if the government is operating the way it *should* be, then the gathering, processing and collating of this data should all be routed through a record so that -- voila -- anytime the government, itself, needs to know what it has on hand then it knows where exactly to look and in one place.
Lol. That's quite the opposite of the US federal government.
In some ways, it's a good thing that the federal government isn't designed for efficiency, that speed and efficiency aren't anywhere on the priority list. As a most obvious example, it would be far quicker and more efficient to have Kim Jong Obama make all of the decisions unilaterally rather than have the whole country debate policy. Heck, it took more than a decade to decide to do Hilarycare, and more than 10 more years to implement it after it was passed. (Including renaming it "Obamacare" along the way.) A dictator would be more efficient, but then you end up with North Korea. So we don't really want efficient government ; we want fair government, we want transparent government, we want big policy decisions to be made carefully, thoughtfully - slowly. Efficiency isn't what we want in government.
He needs to qualify his statement: he's clearly looking for digital computers. The Navy (and for all I know other services) has long used analog computers (yes, with gears) for controlling their big guns; we had them on my ship, a DDG retired in 1992. I believe the last of the analog gunfire control computers were retired from the US Navy in the early 2000s, but I could be wrong.
The government holds auctions on old or now unusable equipment from the nuclear reservation Hanford.
At one time I was going to bid $300 (US) on a Univac that took up an entire corner; if I'd of gotten it, it would of taken over the house (it's huge, with many pieces).
I got the bid on another batch of items -when picking them up I asked about the Univac and was told it was pulled as no bid came close to the value of the gold and other heavy metals it could be melted down for.
That was over 25 years ago so imagine it's part of an engagement ring at this time.
The computers that run the ICBM equipment in Cheyenne, Wyoming are well over 50 years old. If you're interested in seeing antique computers still in use, go to the 'Fort D.A. Russell Days' event, held annually. They give a tour of one of the missile silos, and will tell you all about how old the computers are, yet they keep using them, because they have no need to change.
Also, in a USDA office somewhere in Western Nebraska (Bridgeport, if I'm not mistaken), I once saw an old IBM server in use. I believe it was a PS/2. I noticed it had a 5 1/4 flippy drive, and asked someone about it, and she told me they use it to store mapping coordinates, and that there was only one person there who knew how to use it (it had a CRT from a PS/1 displaying a CLI), and that they could only use it to print results on an impact printer. That was about 3 years ago, and I'm guessing it's still in use today.
http://youtu.be/1Y1ya-yF35g
Does Voyager 2 on-board computer count? "Reason for not upgrading: cost, too expensive to send a technician to the edge of the solar system."
A while back we did a site visit to a bank mainframe room. They had one backup holdover of every mainframe model they had ever bought going back to day one, just in case they needed to rerun some old piece of software. You felt like you were traveling back in time as you went down the backup row.
He goes on to talk about thriftiness, security, "obsolete", and "holding back"... but he doesn't seem to understand the difference. Those indeed are problems, but that doesn't mean the oldest, non-broken, computer is one of them. Windows XP on a public desktop is old; a mainframe data storage retrieval system might be 20 years older. The Windows box is probably "[more] in need of an upgrade."
This seems like a fun project (finding the oldest government computer system), but I'm not sure the author fully understands what that aphorism truly suggests.
Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,
The government keeps assets on the books at acquisition cost forever. They use what is essentially cash based accounting (no accrual) so there's no "depreciating". When you excess government property, you say what it's condition is (one of 3 or 4 choices from "functional", to "needs repair", "beyond economic repair", etc.) and then it goes out for public bid, usually as part of a large lot of stuff.
He should ask the IRS and see if they are off 8 track mag tape, yet. [This is no a a joke, they last I heard, they were trying to get off mag tape.]
An engineer who ran for Congress. http://herbrobinson.us
There is a utility for changing MAC address, hostid etc on those old sparcs for the purpose of such things as running legacy software locked to such details and those things are already running it so they are already pretending to be something other than what is on the chip.
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice ... do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
If you prefer North Korea-style society, you are welcome to move there.