I used to work on those VAX systems for the Navy in the late 80s and early '90s. They weren't even remotely the oldest thing on the ship at the time. It also helped me get my first real job post service with Seattle Public Schools, which still run them. Apparently they're too expensive to replace.

SPS Can't Dump VAX... (new window)

I thought my town was bad for useing 486s to keep the LRT trains from crashing into eachother. And somewhere in city hall there is a climate controlled room where they keep spares.

"The only glitch in the entire system is that it does not recognize the year 2000, so all my printed financial reports say 1912."
Two lines later...
"I thought about changing over to a more modern system, but there is nothing to be gained. As the old saying goes, 'If it ain't broke, don't fix it.'"

I don't know, there could be an issue with all your financial reports post-1999 showing the wrong year.

RPG II, anybody?

What folding, spindling and/or mutilation may look like.

dj_bigbird: That story is very cool. As long as it gets the job done, what diff does it make? And can you still get punch cards for the 401?

from the article: "broken for three years"
^thats why^

also:
wasted space
extra training for operators
physical maintenance
cost of punchcards
inability to export the results in a usable form.
etc...

on a submarine or other examples they gave, at least the machine is something thats highly specialized and hopelessly integrated into the ship, both making replacement at least somewhat difficult.

but keeping something like this that is essentially a calculator or rudimentary spreadsheet is just a straight up poor business choice...

/am all for keeping it running at a museum or something though...

MasterPython: I thought my town was bad for useing 486s to keep the LRT trains from crashing into eachother. And somewhere in city hall there is a climate controlled room where they keep spares.

I used to work for company that bought a lab that did isotope analysis. As recently as 2004, they were still using equipment controlled by an Apple ][ computer. When my company was looking at buying that particular group, I was pretty shocked that they had so much old equipment still in daily use. And it had the 25+ years of kludges one would expect. But, when all was said and done, the only single point of failure that would be difficult to replace was a proprietary controller card. I was able to find a couple of hobbyists who could build me replacements if I provided the parts and schematics (which I could) so it was a good deal. Tho all of that equipment was phased out over time and replaced with contemporary equipment and the only part I ever had to replace from the old setup was an Apple ][. Cost $40 delivered to get a pair thru ebay.

While it's great to get maximum use out of equipment, it's a bad idea to become reliant upon non-commodity equipment. Even a decade puts you at risk these days. I just inherited a system that was apparently built in 2001 and it's going to be a bit of a task to migrate it to new hardware. I'm not even sure if I can create a virtual environment with architecture close enough to this ancient hardware to make it work. It might actually be faster/easier to rewrite the software. :)

And here I can barely keep up using my Windows 2000 box.

Rare headline dudefecta in play.

Rent Party: I used to work on those VAX systems for the Navy in the late 80s and early '90s. They weren't even remotely the oldest thing on the ship at the time. It also helped me get my first real job post service with Seattle Public Schools, which still run them. Apparently they're too expensive to replace.

SPS Can't Dump VAX... (new window)

I used to work on Navy ships that had ancient computers that used Germanium transistors. For all I know, they're still there.

Funny, I was telling a new ops personal who's going through college about this the other day.

I was saying about myself, I think about all the languages I learned and still have up in my head.
People are in awe about those who can speak multiple languages,
but no one ever cares about how "many" languages you know in computers.

I remember Pascal, Cobol, C, Fortran, Assembly...and all the derivatives.
Borland, Master, MS, etc...which I guess would be the equivalent of dialects.

Doing it on a system, with REAL floppies, where you have to load the OS, then the app, then your program and finally the data.
No such thing as a harddrive back then...and that was only in 1985.

But then I was saying, how about all those who came before me...that had to do punchcard programming.

/thanx for the reference, I'll be able to show her now, out of interest.
//funny, she was cringing today at the thought of Oracle, and having to type in commands...oooo

There's a Public Storage by my house, where the gate is controlled by an Apple IIe. I suppose both of the door keypads they used interfaced with it using some custom hardware. I asked them once what they'd do if it the computer died - they told me they have an entire spare system.

/csb

i miss writing COBOL on punch cards

BizarreMan: What about the expense of storing punch cards for years worth of data? It just seems stupid to hold onto the past like that.

Not only that, but I can only imagine how much power that legacy IBM system consumes. Same with the VAX mainframes.

When I was in community college we had to learn how to use the punch card system. The assembly language course they offered was on a Xerox 530, and you had to submit you program as punch cards. I knew the system was obsolete and complained about it. I pointed out that the maintanance contract for those outdated pieces of garbage would pay for an entire lab worth of desktop PCs (the very first IBM PC model). I was (probably) ignored, but the following year they dumped those things and replaced them with a lab of IBM PCs. They wouldn't let me take the assembly language course over since I had received an A for it the previous year.

markie_farkie: [zapp5.staticworld.net image 350x233]

HAHAHA I had that EXACT SAME desk in my bedroom, back in the early 80s. I bought it, and my C64 at Service Merchandise at the mall.

I spent many an hour going blind at that desk, since my C64 was connected to an ancient blurry color TV..

that is my desk too

Old technology works just fine for the military. You know what happens when you incorporate windows into every piece of hardware? Software patches. Mandatory Updates. Antivirus. Hardware and software verification. More software patches. Security hole patches. More updates. For every single piece of hardware you install it on. It creates a mess of a system and a tangle of bureaucracy that makes it where you cannot even install a stand alone system that will never even see a LAN, let alone the internet, without 6 months of information assurance verification. But yet, in their infinite wisdom, our congressmen think COTS is the way to go.

/but I'm not bitter

While I was in college, I had a part time job where I did finite element analysis on CDC 7600 mainframes. All the input was on punch cards. I still remember the day the operator called me and told me that someone had dropped my input. One and a half boxes of punch cards scattered over the floor. The funny lines on the top of the cards helped, but it took a long long time to get everything back in the right order.

/my csb

I'm still trying to weigh in my head the pros and cons of military specific hardware vs COTS.

COTS does reduce initial costs of products(such as computers) for the military.
MILSPEC hardware tends to last a lot longer, and repair costs are a lot lower.

The MILSPEC computers we use on our aircraft are decades old, but they generally still run about as good as new.
Our COTS gear has gone through 3 revisions within the past few years, and spends a lot more time being troubleshot.

/For those of you wondering, COTS stands for Commercial Off The Shelf. Maybe it should be CotS, but that just looks kind of stupid.

Benni K Rok: COTS does reduce initial costs of products(such as computers) for the military.
MILSPEC hardware tends to last a lot longer, and repair costs are a lot lower.

Also, once a COTS part goes obsolete, you're pretty much farked. Currently working on a system that began development around a decade ago that incorporates a PC-on-a-board. Well guess what? That Pentium III board they used -- isn't made or supported anymore, so have fun fielding the system without any means to support or repair it. COTS is stupid, stupid, stupid.

Somewhere out there, a Series1 still hates me.

I think the Mohawk system & Tandem NSII wanted it that way.

/banks earned the rep for being cheap
//and passed some of it on to a hospital I used to work for

StrangeQ: Benni K Rok: COTS does reduce initial costs of products(such as computers) for the military.
MILSPEC hardware tends to last a lot longer, and repair costs are a lot lower.

Also, once a COTS part goes obsolete, you're pretty much farked. Currently working on a system that began development around a decade ago that incorporates a PC-on-a-board. Well guess what? That Pentium III board they used -- isn't made or supported anymore, so have fun fielding the system without any means to support or repair it. COTS is stupid, stupid, stupid.

The contract to keep our Pentium IV boards fixed must be earning somebody a pretty penny.

t3knomanser: At the same time, you're now tying yourself to the commercial upgrade cycle- which is significantly tighter than any sane military cycle would be, because it's driven by profit margins, not actual upgrade needs. For stuff like desktop computers, who cares, really? The real problem is when you're building that COTS stuff into hardware that isn't going to be tied to commercial upgrade cycles- like jets and robots and the like.

How about freaking destroyers? >.> We're putting a windows system in right now, won't say what for, but I will say that windows XP reaches its end of service in 2014, and windows 7 hasn't been approved yet. So in two years we're going to have a system in place on our warships that has zero support. Brilliant.

markie_farkie: HAHAHA I had that EXACT SAME desk in my bedroom, back in the early 80s. I bought it, and my C64 at Service Merchandise at the mall.

I spent many an hour going blind at that desk, since my C64 was connected to an ancient blurry color TV..

Service Merchandise

Dood, I remember the fark out of Service Merchandise!

Benni K Rok: I'm still trying to weigh in my head the pros and cons of military specific hardware vs COTS.

COTS does reduce initial costs of products(such as computers) for the military.
MILSPEC hardware tends to last a lot longer, and repair costs are a lot lower.

The MILSPEC computers we use on our aircraft are decades old, but they generally still run about as good as new.
Our COTS gear has gone through 3 revisions within the past few years, and spends a lot more time being troubleshot.

/For those of you wondering, COTS stands for Commercial Off The Shelf. Maybe it should be CotS, but that just looks kind of stupid.

When I was going through Signal Corps training, I had to deal with this thing we called "The Beast": the ANG/RC-50 voice and data communication unit. It was a half-assed machine, designed to be used as a bridge between the old FDM-based comm units, while awaiting the new PCM-based ones. This thing did both, and was huge, dating from the 1960's-70's. At some point, someone decided that because it operated on both platforms, it was twice as useful, so it should just be kept. Never mind that it was klunky and error-prone, and you has to make SEVENTY presets to the thing before you could even turn it on. Meanwhile, other units got the modern PCM-only units, which were smaller, lighter and simpler to use. One of those guys could carry one on his back; ours was transported in a truck. Sometimes, things are broke by their very nature, and need to be fixed.

We have an application that dates back to 1978. It works. And it works on hardware we should of ditched a decade ago. But not running or supporting that idiotic application who cost us more.

/yes - its an application that deals with the federal government - why do you ask?

StrangeQ: We're putting a windows system in right now, won't say what for, but I will say that windows XP reaches its end of service in 2014, and windows 7 hasn't been approved yet.

I'm surprised that they're using a consumer OS as opposed to something more on the embedded/industrial side, like QNX, VxWorks or OS-9.

Yeah Whatever: While I was in college, I had a part time job where I did finite element analysis on CDC 7600 mainframes.

LOL...my first job after college (1971) was writing FORTRAN and APL code on a CDC 6400...via a 300 baud modem.

*interwebs high-five*

Quantum Apostrophe: Computers? Before NASA? Impossible. I've been assured by very learned members of Fark, that computers only exist because of the pressing need to put test pilots into orbital tin cans. There was no need for computers before that, and there certainly weren't intelligent people before either.

HOAX.

I'm genuinely curious... every time anything with even the most tangential connection to NASA or space travel in general comes up, sooner or later you're there, posting with frothing-at-the-mouth rage about how much you hate NASA, "space nutters" and space travel in general. What gives, dude, seriously? Did John Glenn pee in your cheerios when you were a kid?

Oh, and yes, the need to have the Apollo flight computer do what it did with only one cubic foot of circuitry did in fact prompt important advances in miniaturization and integration.