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America's Cities Are Running on Software From the '80s (bloomberg.com)
Even San Francisco's tech chops can't save it from relying on computers that belong in a museum. From a report: The only place in San Francisco still pricing real estate like it's the 1980s is the city assessor's office. Its property tax system dates back to the dawn of the floppy disk. City employees appraising the market work with software that runs on a dead programming language and can't be used with a mouse. Assessors are prone to make mistakes when using the vintage software because it can't display all the basic information for a given property on one screen. The staffers have to open and exit several menus to input stuff as simple as addresses. To put it mildly, the setup "doesn't reflect business needs now," says the city's assessor, Carmen Chu.
San Francisco rarely conjures images of creaky, decades-old technology, but that's what's running a key swath of its government, as well as those of cities across the U.S. Politicians can often score relatively easy wins with constituents by borrowing money to pay for new roads and bridges, but the digital equivalents of such infrastructure projects generally don't draw the same enthusiasm. "Modernizing technology is not a top issue that typically comes to mind when you talk to taxpayers and constituents on the street," Chu says. It took her office almost four years to secure $36 million for updated assessors' hardware and software that can, among other things, give priority to cases in which delays may prove costly. The design requirements are due to be finalized this summer.
San Francisco rarely conjures images of creaky, decades-old technology, but that's what's running a key swath of its government, as well as those of cities across the U.S. Politicians can often score relatively easy wins with constituents by borrowing money to pay for new roads and bridges, but the digital equivalents of such infrastructure projects generally don't draw the same enthusiasm. "Modernizing technology is not a top issue that typically comes to mind when you talk to taxpayers and constituents on the street," Chu says. It took her office almost four years to secure $36 million for updated assessors' hardware and software that can, among other things, give priority to cases in which delays may prove costly. The design requirements are due to be finalized this summer.
It's Java, right? Tell me it's Java!
The only reason for San Francisco to upgrade is if they want to be like Atlanta and get to try out some ransomware code on their production systems
Buwahahaha. Speaking as a guy who maintains old Unix and OpenVMS boxes for a living I can tell you that most people would have zero idea what to do if they did "get in" to a mainframe or even a mini. Those skills are very rare and that's why people pay good money for folks who have skills beyond the basics that lots of schmucks learn from using Bash on their Ubuntu machine. I watch newbies with MVS, MPE, and VMS and they can't even change directories, much less do any damage. The mother fuckers couldn't even set their terminals up for proper emulation. I've gone as far as to give people access to honeypot environments for various mainframe and minicomputer operating systems from the 1980's (long story on how I set that up) but it was hilarious watching children from China, Romania, Israel, Bulgaria, Russia, Ukraine, and even a few Americans flop around like fish once they dropped to an environment that doesn't have command line completion and on screen help to walk their ignorant asses through everything. These little tykes are too dumb to do much damage, even though all they'd have to do is READ for about 10 minutes to get familiar with things (so in other words - forget it). Hell there are even Youtube videos on how to get around on a various mainframes. Nonetheless, only the true Scotsmen seem to have the attention span to pull it off and they are too busy making money and living well to worry about breaking into old city mainframes.