A hunt for the government's oldest computer | Hacker News Reader

A hunt for the government's oldest computer

muckrock.com

117 pointsmrweasel51 comments

At one stage I suspected I was in charge of the oldest in use computer still running in the world.

In 2001, the Australian Navy still used the Mk152 computer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNIVAC_418 on the last remaining Charles F Adams class destroyer, HMAS BRISBANE.

It was a general purpose computer entirely constructed from individual transistors with magnetic core memory. We had two of these onboard and if both were down we couldn't fire the missile system. I had 3 sailors dedicates solely to keeping these ancient machines running.

We got to diagnose some pretty cool bugs, like what happens when the card corresponding the the lowest significant bit of the least use register has an intermittent fault due to a bad mechanical connection.

That's pretty neat. My favorite of the older ones was the NSA machine that used mercury for memory. Report said overflow errors were more serious than on most systsms. ;)

In 2001 at RTA in Sydney they still had a PDP-11 they were proud of.

I find the wording in this blog entry interesting - in particular "most in need of an upgrade".

In my opinion, hardware that can be repaired and software that has been running in production for years is not in need of an upgrade. The need to refresh software or hardware exists purely to keep vendors in business and even just to keep some I.T. departments busy and their C.V.'s up to date.

Provided a system is working reliably and is not dependent on changing external requirements there is no need to upgrade. The risk to a business or entity from the constant upgrade cycle is far greater than keeping something existing and tested running.

That's true except when said system needs to be repaired and there is no one left who knows how to work with any systems that old. In that case it can be painful finding someone knowledgeable enough to work with a system that old.

My rule of the thumb would be - if you can't buy a drop-in replacement and get it delivered in a week, it's outdated.

It doesn't even have to fail in a software/hardware specific way. If your floor collapses or is flooded, and you're using old mainframe with code written in Natural or similar, what's your DR story? Which actually makes me curious - does anyone know what the DR plans look like for companies using 70's mainframes? Let's say a critical S/370 in company basement? (and yes, I'm aware that new z series should virtualise that just fine, but in practice... if you lose a mainframe, what do you even do?)

I guess for anything IBM related, you can still throw many at IBM. With other companies, you might be out of luck.

Many DR plans are actually 1. pray that nothing bad happens, 2. else unbounded panic.

Some organizations are resistant to change and that's OK, but when systems are maintained to the point that they become a historical curiosity-- that's going a bit too far.

Aside from comically high maintenance costs (which only the government and perhaps banks can afford to pay), such organizations also need to _hire_, _train_ and _retain_ staff that can actually do their jobs on these things. It simply isn't feasible to keep let alone recruit strong talent in an environment where legacy goes beyond a certain level. Yeah, good employees _ARE_ going to be concerned about their C.V.'s and that is understandable.

An excessive "upgrade cycle" may, in some cases be risky, but a vastly more common problem is orgs that don't change/adapt/upgrade fast enough. That has risks and costs as well.

NORAD? http://www.gao.gov/assets/140/133240.pdf

Voyager 1? http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/didyouknow.html http://history.nasa.gov/computers/Ch6-2.html

Thanks for the link to the NORAD report.

I toured NORAD inside Cheyenne Mountain back in 1990 or '91, back when you had to submit background information to apply for the tour, and I saw that computing gear. It was amazing to see buildings on giants springs and caverns with Diesel locomotives in them for back-up power.

For sure there's still software written for the IBM 360/370 mainframe series in production, just running either natively or in emulation on a newer zSeries 'frame. "Mainframe" doesn't necessarily mean "old".

I used to run a couple hobbyist/enthusiast sites and mailing lists for people who collected and restored old DEC equipment (and I still run an all-systems-welcome "rescue" list). Shortly after 9/11, I got a phone call from someone working in the Pentagon who was looking for parts to repair a VAX that had been damaged...

>> "Mainframe" doesn't necessarily mean "old".

Yep, today they tend to look like something out of Battlestar Galactica:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_System_z

I've started working with Z/OS on Zseries machines just a few months ago. Obviously, I'm still learning. There is a _lot_ to learn- it's nothing like linux :0

That's one of the reasons I like fiddling around with the Hercules emulator - exposure to a system that's completely and totally alien compared to what I have used for years and do for a living.

I bet the Federal Reserve still uses old mainframes.

Edit: Not sure why I am being down-voted. A lot of banks still use mainframes:

http://mainframes.wikidot.com/

http://www.networkworld.com/article/2916081/network-manageme...

You're right, mainframes are huge in finance, and I wouldn't be surprised to find that the Fed uses them.

I found the second link you posted to be quite baffling; I have worked for several companies where I had to integrate newer and older systems, and I would never list "integration" as a reason to use a mainframe. Yes, it can be done, but in my experience the assumption is that the mainframe must be worked around, with all of its fixed-width EBCDIC glory.

US nuclear missiles still use 8-inch floppy disks. Presumably on some 8-bit micro from the time.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/05/01/floppy-disk-nuclear...

And of course we're still using operating systems from the 70's - Unix (in Linux form) and VMS (in Windows form).

EDIT: Typo, Corrected 80's to 70's.

Windows is based on VMS? Huh? If anything, it's based on DOS and OS/2 (NT).

Dave Cutler was a lead for VMS, then left DEC for Microsoft and led the development of Windows NT.

What you consider today "Windows" is actually Windows NT. Dave Cuttler was a lead architect of both NT and VMS.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Cutler

Cuttler and a core of VMS team exited en masse to work on NT. In fact, he coined the term "WNT" as a play on "VMS", each letter is a successor to the corresponding one. (c.f. IBM <==> HAL)

http://windowsitpro.com/windows-client/windows-nt-and-vms-re...

Unix and VMS are both from the 70s.

Unix the kernel is from the 70s. Unix the userland is from today. Unix the API is eternal! :-)

They may just be lore at this point, but I've heard stories from friends in the government about older IRS records being kept on punchcards and read into S/360 family machines. The VA is also apparently heavily dependent on a legacy MUMPS[1] codebase, although that could run on more modern machines in principle.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MUMPS

There should be a way to connect a card reader to a newish System Z machine - IBM is famous for its legacy support - likely via some wonky shit over SNA. MUMPS is also fairly portable to new architectures as it was cross platform out of the gate.

S/360 and descendant mainframes have gone through 3 generations of IO technologies: bus & tag channel (parallel copper cabling), ESCON (proprietary 1990s era fibre optic system), FICON (Fibre Channel based). Contemporary System z mainframes only support FICON, whereas card punches/readers were only ever bus & tag. However, I'm aware that some third party vendors offer protocol converters between bus&tag and ESCON, and between ESCON and FICON, (e.g. Optica Prizm) so in theory it is possible you could use a bus&tag-ESCON and ESCON-FICON converter in series to connect your legacy card punch/reader to a new System z mainframe. I don't know if anyone has tried it, so I don't know if it actually works. (I also don't know to what degree the IO code to handle physical card punches/readers still works in contemporary mainframe OSes, although given that virtual card punches/readers are still used under z/VM, it is possible that some of that code might still handle real ones.)

For no other reason than to satisfy my curiosity, I would love to see this done.

I was thinking of the support for RJE or some such might be less work - albeit likely much slower.

I did contact work with the IRS from '06-'09, on the IMF and BMF (master file system) and I assure you there are no punch cards. Old school main frame assembly yes, but no punch cards.

Well, that's a bit of a relief.

The last I heard CADE2, the modernized (J2EE) system, had replaced the majority of the IMF functionality (IMF is the core of tax return processing). I'm not completely sure though as I haven't talked to those guys in over 4 years now.

Pun intended?

Based on an old slashdot article there are still some PDP-11's still in use. http://developers.slashdot.org/story/13/06/19/1227244/pdp-11...

The PDP-11 was the first thing that came to mind. I'm sure there a still a few of those out there.

Wonder if the FAA has ever gotten their upgrades fully done.. From 23 years ago:

http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/stories/1993-04-25/flying-in-pla...

Hrm, as of last year, doesn't look like it:

http://dailycaller.com/2015/07/28/faas-air-traffic-control-u...

This isn't government, but there are some commercial outfits still using punch cards (or did in 2012).

http://www.pcworld.com/article/249951/if_it_aint_broke_dont_...

This article does mention this though: A recent federal review found that the U.S. Secret Service uses a mainframe computer system from the 1980s.

Here's an article discussing some old government computers as well as the 1948 era IBM 402 mechanical punch card accounting machine in use by a Texas company: http://www.pcworld.com/article/249951/if_it_aint_broke_dont_...

You should send an email out to New York City Subway. I have heard their technology stack is pretty outdated.

Certainly if he's looking at local governments, MTA will be near the top of the list.

This article was pretty popular here a few months ago: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/11/why-do...

Well, the actual switching and interlocking hardware might be a century old in places, but the computers are at most half of that. Hardly "oldest".

Minuteman uses VAXen:

http://www.pcworld.com/article/249951/if_it_aint_broke_dont_...

State of Hawaii uses a 40 year old VAX for its payroll. http://www.hawaiibusiness.com/the-state-of-hawaiis-plan-to-m...

Last I heard, the budget and plan to replace it got thrown out as a cost saving exercise, but I haven't been involved in the Hawaii tech scene for nearly 3 years now.

Is this including local government? Because I remember reading that the Detroit public school system uses punchcards still.

Just curious, to do what kind of jobs?

I can't remember now, but this is the reddit thread about it:

https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/25mp2r/punch_card...

Considering that Unisys only recently stopped selling their traditional processors, I wouldn't be surprised if the original machines are still humming away somewhere that couldn't budget an upgrade to the newer stuff.

That Gateway they still 'own' - maybe it's long lost, just still on the records? Pictures, or it didn't happen.

Still amazing they never upgraded that poor sod.

You'd be surprised. Lots of money number crunching and facility software does stuff like this. I've seen 486 boxes running door entry systems within the last 5 years.

I'm also aware of a network of NT4 Alpha boxes running in production.

So I wasnt the only one that deployed those, eh? Haha. Used them for obfuscation against Intel attacks. Nobody was the wiser. :)

I saw a VAX still in the rack a few years ago at an army base might be a good place to look..

It would be interesting to perform a similar exercise for UK government agencies.

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