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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.
Depends. I work in such a government office. Our property tax billing software is written in COBOL, was first written in the very early 1980's, and does generally work well.
HOWEVER - whew boy is that some weird code. Nothing is driven by configuration tables. Pretty much every behavior is hard coded into the program. Even for security permissions like who can access which screens, there's literally a user ID HARDCODED into the source.
And god help you if you need to something like widen a text field (all of which are notoriously small due to being defined back when disk space was much more expensive). You'll have to recompile dozens of programs that hit that file, and often times when it's absolutely necessary we have to cobble together fields to make a bigger one (ie, positions 1 through 30 of a field might be in the middle of a line, 30 through 40 towards the end, and then 40 through 50 in another field at the very end of each line.
Rather than being an example of how good the code is, I think it's more an example of the fact that even for bad (or even terrible) code, if you've had 30 years to debug it it'll still function fine. It's an unmanageable mess, but it does indeed do exactly what its supposed to.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain