Posted on 02/12/2025 12:55:26 PM PST by mairdie
...
The problem with that starts with the fact that it's not in a database. It's a wildly heterogeneous collection of different databases, ISAM files, and card images, and I would bet money that a lot of it is on old 7-track tapes. Some of these are probably stored in Iron Mountain or a similar installation. Also, some of the data may still be just on paper, as, apparently, government retirement records are.
So what Big Balls and the other wizards are going to need to do to start with is find the data.
I'm willing to bet there's no single catalog of all the data sets. Having found the data, much of it is card images that almost certainly are only documented by COBOL copybooks. (Back in 2020, I wrote about COBOL for the Stack Overflow Blog when it suddenly became trendy as some of these systems desperately needed to be maintained.)
(Excerpt) Read more at pjmedia.com ...
Did you do DoD work with I’ve Been Moved?
I was in the contest to design the DoD-I language thru Steelman reqs that resulted in Ada. We (Red) came in 2nd and got the contract to fix all the mistakes Jean Ichbiah made in the design of Green, that got him the French Legion of Honor for designing the American defense language Ada. Later, I started the newsletter Ada LETTERS and the group AdaTEC under ACM’s SIGPLAN, Special Interest Group on Programming Languages, which I chaired at the time.
The DoD software I was familiar with wasn’t that bad.
Having said that, the Navy depot level rework facility I was at didn’t take up a digital aircraft processing document platform until just a few years ago......I’m sure that’s been commonplace in the private sector for years.
Those were 9-track machines. The early ones were NRZI encoded and the later ones Phase Encoded. The PE machines could read/write the NRZI tapes.
Phew that’s old school. Cobol maybe even assembly language.
https://www.iment.com/maida/computer/redref/index.htm
OVERVIEW OF THE ADA LANGUAGE COMPETITION
All I heard in the day were horror stories.
9 year old article in the age of US govt comp systems but I still think many of them have not been updated.
The postal system computers are really a mess.
https://www.nextgov.com/digital-government/2016/05/10-oldest-it-systems-federal-government/128599/
I worked at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville in the 1973-1975 time frame, and handled an awful lot of 9-track tapes. I bet some of the 7-track units were lurking there.
“It’s a wildly heterogeneous collection of different databases,”
If employee data is involved, there should be SSNs, which could be handy as a key field in a relational database.
As for the other records, it’ll be a MESS.
People tried for years to redo entire systems. IBM was one of those to get a contract to replace one messed up system and the contract was eventually dropped. Just not possible. I’m betting IBM was more polite and cooperative with existing systems than Musk’s people will be. I see them as human steamrollers. Which is GOOD!
I started the newsletter Ada LETTERS and the group AdaTEC under ACM’s SIGPLAN, Special Interest Group on Programming Languages, which I chaired at the time.>> I remember all that and was a local ACM chapter head. I just threw away some of the old issues of the mag.
I wrote the manual for the Navy language SPL/I, Signal Processing Language I. That was the late 70’s when government overseerers showed up with bare chests to their waist and gold chains, bragging about their employment level. That’s how I got into language design. I’d be told of one language change and be able to make all the parallel changes to keep the language consistent. Didn’t realize I knew the language, just knew I knew my book cold. Fun days. Was also on the program committee for History of Programming Languages run by Jean Sammet. She was another big Star Trek fan.
My first ones were on xerox paper. I got companies to pay for duplication and mailing and sent them out free. Only cost money when it went under SIGPLAN. Had a whole group of departments that supplied the articles. My first issue had an Ada program from Bob Mathis on how to care for his brand new adopted infant.
Ada is a pretty good language. PL/SQL in Oracle databases is modeled after it.
“I see them as human steamrollers.”
The kids could look back on this project as the most exciting and fun in their lives.
at least they have mostly retired 8” floppies
I think British warships still use them
Jean Ichbiah’s first design decision was that the book would be 50 pages long. Later, in his redesign, he kept all the syntax the same and only changed the underlying semantics. !!!!!
Was at a conference meeting and heard great stories from a well-known Bell Labs researcher of people on submarines spending their time reverse engineering computer systems sent out without source code. Nothing much else to do.
“So what Big Balls and the other wizards are going to need to do to start with is find the data.”
Trace their off-site backups.
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