Inside the Hidden World of Legacy IT Systemshttps://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/it/inside-hidden-world-legacy-it-systemsThis past spring, tens of millions of Americans lost their jobs due to lockdowns aimed at slowing the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. And untold numbers of the newly jobless waited weeks for their unemployment benefit claims to be processed, while others anxiously watched their bank accounts for an extra US $600 weekly payment from the federal government.
Delays in processing unemployment claims in 19 states—Alaska, Arizona, Colorado, Connecticut, Hawaii, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Texas, Vermont, Virginia, and Wisconsin—are attributed to problems with antiquated and incompatible state and federal unemployment IT systems. Most of those systems date from the 1980s, and some go back even further.
Things were so bad in New Jersey that Governor Phil Murphy pleaded in a press conference for volunteer COBOL programmers to step up to fix the state’s ÂDisability Automated Benefits ÂSystem. A clearly exasperated Murphy said that when the pandemic passed, there would be a post mortem focused on the question of “how the heck did we get here when we literally needed cobalt [sic] programmers?â€
Similar problems have emerged at the federal level. As part of the federal government’s pandemic relief plan, eligible U.S. taxpayers were to receive $1,200 payments from the Internal Revenue Service. However, it took up to 20 weeks to send out all the payments because the IRS computer systems are even older than the states’ unemployment systems, some dating back almost 60 years.
...
But governments aren’t the only ones struggling under the weight of antiquated IT. It is equally easy to find airlines, banks, insurance companies, and other commercial entities that continue to rely on old IT, contending with software or hardware that is no longer supported by the supplier or has defects that are too costly to repair. These systems are prone to outages and errors, vulnerable to cyberÂintrusions, and progressively more expensive and difficult to maintain.
Among my former employers is Tandem Computers (not Tandy Corporation). It was started in the mid 1970s by refugees from HP whose big idea had been rejected. Their idea was a system that would not be brought down by any single failure. They also had a requester-server architecture that was sort of like current server-desktops architecture. In the late 70s into the early 90s Tandem was a high flyer. But Tandem had proprietary OS and processor designs, and ignored customer demand for Unix compatibility and the potential for low cost processors to eat away at Tandem's low-end systems. In the mid-90s Tandem went from a large lay-off to a belated attempt to utilize Windows and Intel processors to being bought by Compaq to Compaq being bought by ........ HP. I went with the big layoff and didn't directly experience what followed.
But - here's where this shaggy dog story was headed - it was almost 20 years before HP finally pulled the plug on the group that had been helping Tandem customers - banks, commodity exchanges, and more - keep their legacy Tandem systems going until the systems were finally replaced. 20 years! So it isn't totally surprising that governments and businesses that committed to IBM in the 60s and 70s and have decades worth of COBOL programs running core parts of their businesses and departments have been very slow to replace 10s or 100s of millions of $$ worth of computer equipment and programs that are proven workhorses.
