Did you do DoD work with I’ve Been Moved?
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.
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/
“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.
“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.
BB and co don’t need to go back to data on such media.
Just reading all these old software names makes me feel much younger. I wonder if my hairline will go back to where it is supposed to be. Too much forehead these days.
Too many poorly designed, stovepiped systems.
bookmark.
This brings back memories of digging into systems that had no documentation, reverse engineering to discover how the data was structured, and how the systems used / accessed the data.
I was pretty good at that, but nothing like what these DOGE dudes are doing.
Why Government Computers Are Such a Mess
Oh man, don’t get me started!!! LOL
I used to do federal and state computer work and was always shocked at how obsolete they were.
It’s not like on tv....
9-track
At my current employer, I was called in to rescue a project that was months behind as the Ada engineers struggled to write good code and fully document with 2167 processes. The customer was "done" and directed a change to C++. The Ada "engineers" were not C++ literate. It took a couple weeks to spin them up. By week three, we were delivering on contract requirements. Ada isn't dead, but it was just the wrong language for the problem to be solved.
I worked with a company, TSRI (The Software Revolution, Inc) that has very fine tools for taking legacy code in COBOL and modernizing it to present day standards. The project I did with them converted a dedicated Win32 UI running in Windows to an application that runs in a web browser. The translation was so good that you could run the Windows app and browser version side by side...and the browser version ran faster. Zero retraining cost for the user population. Deployment of updates became an update on the server only. Nothing touched on the user Windows client machines. Full re-use of the Windows client machines...just launch the browser and go.
Conversion of old code to modern standards isn't impossible. Even if you only have paper copies of the source code. Decent OCR gets it off the paper. A translation process similar to what TSRI offers can rapidly turn the old stuff into something useful. AI wasn't even a feature of the TSRI process when I worked with them in the past. I'll bet it is part of the process now.
Sheesh... not even VSAM?
-PJ
My only exposure to government computers was back in the mid-1980’s.
The Congresscritter I had just gone to work for had bought their computer system from GSA and they had been given only three options...an IBM PC, an Apple Macintosh, or an Exxon computer.
Yes, at one point Exxon, the oil company, was in the personal computer business.
Guess which one the idiot bought?
My first task was to get the GSA to take the Exxon computer back and send us an IBM PC.
After we got PCs in the Washington and district office, I then suggested we use modems (!) to send our correspondence back and forth and set up THAT system and put together a rudimentary LAN to share those documents in each office.
COBOL copybooks.
Don’t forget the 88’s and Redefines.
Computer systems don’t pay union dues, bureaucrats do.
That’s why they modernize at a glacial pace.
Trump needs to decertify public employee unions.