MuckRock Identifies The Oldest US Government Computer Still in Use (muckrock.com)

Slashdot reader v3rgEz writes: When MuckRock started using public records to find the oldest computer in use by the U.S. government, they scoured the country -- but it wasn't until a few tipsters that they set their sights a little higher and found that the oldest computer in use by the government might be among other planets entirely.
The oldest computer still in use by the U.S. government appears to be the on-board systems for the Voyager 1 and 2 space probes -- nearly 40 years old, and 12.47 billion miles away from earth. (Last year NASA put out a call for a FORTRAN programmer to upgrade the probes' software.) But an earlier MuckRock article identified their oldest software still in use on earth -- "the computers inside the IRS that makes sure everybody is paying their taxes". And it also identified their oldest hardware still in use -- "the machines running the nuclear defense system". (The launch commands are still stored on 8-inch floppy disks.)

Comments

Re:good.

[Calydor]

I am morbidly curious how they test whether the disks with the launch codes are still in usable condition ...

Old sometimes better than new

[BlytheBowman]

I imagine the old 8" floppies mentioned in one of the linked Slashdot articles were quite sturdy and reliable, at least compared to the crap 3 1/2" floppies I had the (dis)pleasure of using, right about the time CD-R drives started to become common on PCs. Read errors, "Track 0 bad -Disk unusable" and other such shit being fairly common no matter what floppy disk brand or how good the floppy drive in the computer was. Sometimes, after many tries, and some physical manupulation of the disk I could get the disk to finaly read the "bad" sector correctly, so I could copy the data off of it before it went into the garbage. I rarely had these problems with the 5 1/4" disks I used years before. Old computer equipmemt from 30+ years ago were built like tanks, designed to last at least a decade, much more reliable due to the primitive, simple OSes and software, the chips themselves had bigger/thicker transistors runing at very low speeds, and most used "hardwired" mask roms for the BIOS. Your tablet or phone probaly won't work 30 years from now due to the contents and BIOS data fading from the flash chips used for everything including system roms, but as long as the old antique hardware from the 80s back is kept in good condition, they will probaly still work fine centuries later, at least after the capacitors are replaced (caps are rather volitile, even modern ones).