If It Ain't Broke, Don't Fix It: Ancient Computers in Use Today

PC World ^ | 19 February 2012 | Benj Edwards

[ShadowAce]

It’s easy to wax nostalgic about old technology--to remember fondly our first Apple IIe or marvel at the old mainframes that ran on punched cards. But no one in their right mind would use those outdated, underpowered dinosaurs to run a contemporary business, let alone a modern weapons system, right?

Wrong!

While much of the tech world views a two-year-old smartphone as hopelessly obsolete, large swaths of our transportation and military infrastructure, some modern businesses, and even a few computer programmers rely daily on technology that hasn’t been updated for decades.

If you’ve recently bought a MetroCard for the New York City Subway or taken money from certain older ATMs, for instance, your transaction was made possible by IBM’s OS/2, an operating system that debuted 25 years ago and faded out soon after.

A recent federal review found that the U.S. Secret Service uses a mainframe computer system from the 1980s. That system apparently works only 60 percent of the time. Here’s hoping that uptime statistics are better for the ancient minicomputers used by the U.S. Department of Defense for the Minuteman Intercontinental Ballistic Missile system, Navy submarines, fighter jets, and other weapons programs. Those systems, according to the consultants who help keep them going, will likely be used until at least the middle of this century.

Here are a few stories of the computers that time forgot, and the people and institutions that stubbornly hold on to them.

Punch-Card Accounting

Sparkler Filters of Conroe, Texas, prides itself on being a leader in the world of chemical process filtration. If you buy an automatic nutsche filter from them, though, they’ll enter your transaction on a “computer” that dates from 1948.

Sparkler Filters' IBM 402,

[ken in texas]

Several years ago I was on an airplane with a recent computer science graduate. I asked him how he liked assembly language. He looked at me like I was speaking Swahili. He had NO IDEA what assembly language was. What the heck are they teaching for 4 years ?

This is not new. During my quest for a BS in Computer Science we had to write and run programs in COBOL, Fortran, MIX, Algol, GPSS, Simula, SNOBOL, LISP, and probably a couple others I've forgotten.

During my first USAF assignment I was working with a Captain with a MS in Comp Sci.

Around 1976 we had a new 2nd Lieutenant join the group; had a BS in Comp Sci but had never "run" a program. In her curriculum you wrote the COBOL program out on paper and the instructor graded the source code.

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Yup....

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AmigaOS

AmigaOS is the default native operating system of the Amiga personal computer. It was developed first by Commodore International, and initially introduced in 1985 with the Amiga 1000. Old versions only run on the Motorola 68k series of 16-bit and 32-bit microprocessors, while the newer AmigaOS 4 runs only on PowerPC

****************************************snip*****************************************

The current holder of the Amiga intellectual properties is Amiga Inc. In 2001 they contracted AmigaOS 4 development to Hyperion Entertainment and in 2009 they granted Hyperion an exclusive, perpetual, worldwide right to AmigaOS 3.1 in order to develop and market AmigaOS 4 and subsequent versions.^[1]

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

This gives you something:

[ADemocratNoMore]

A friend tells a story of a business owner who bought an S100 system and had a custom software package written for it. As part of the contract, it was stipulated that the user was allowed to port the software to other machines but had to have the original package running when the port was being used. Jump forward forty years and the same software is running on what would have been science-fiction hardware back then, and somewhere in a closet sits a powered-up Altair or Imsai on a UPS running the original software to keep everything legal.

Also, Amiga kudos. A machine WAY ahead of it's time. For better or worse, Alex St. John, one of the fellows who was behind the design of DirectX was influenced by the Amiga OS architecture.

[NonValueAdded]

I wired those 402 boards along with 548, 514, and the 85 sorter.

Ah yes, I remember. I stepped up to the 1130 and the 1620 after that. I think there was some PDP4 time in there too.