[HN Gopher] Oldest software system in continuous use
___________________________________________________________________
Oldest software system in continuous use
Author : ZeljkoS
Score : 152 points
Date : 2022-11-25 12:14 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.guinnessworldrecords.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.guinnessworldrecords.com)
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| nuc1e0n wrote:
| "this code is specific to the System/360 Architecture, and so
| cannot be run on anything other than an IBM mainframe." This is
| not true. Emulators are pretty effective and can have passthoughs
| to new capabilities. Like the ability to play gameboy link cable
| games over the internet for example
| retrac wrote:
| There's a very complete System/360 through modern zSeries
| emulator [1] [2] that runs basically every IBM mainframe OS.
| IBM does not license their recent operating systems or
| languages to run on it. Though you can of course run Linux, or
| older versions of MVS or VM. Lack of OS and tool licensing is a
| showstopper for many users who might otherwise transition away
| from IBM hardware through emulation.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hercules_(emulator)
|
| [2] https://sdl-hercules-390.github.io/html/
| the_only_law wrote:
| Doesn't z/Arch natively support S/360 binaries as well.
| nuc1e0n wrote:
| Are modern versions of IBM systems even popular compared to
| Linux? The reason these systems still exist is because they
| use legacy versions of software that could be covered by
| emulation. Any migration whatsoever would be contingent on
| the cost.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| I'm sure z/OS is not nearly as popular as linux servers but
| there is a niche market for what it provides, just because
| it is old does not mean it is inferior.
| Exendroinient00 wrote:
| Last people managing this kind of old legacy software will
| inevitably die. The Young generation probably won't replace the
| entire industry, and from that point onward we would have a
| pretty massive rot and the forgotten knowledge rippling through
| the entire society.
| jackmott wrote:
| danpalmer wrote:
| Some of the modernisation efforts for these sorts of systems are
| fascinating.
|
| The US DOD have built a COBOL to Java transpiler that emits
| nearly-idiomatic Java. As far as I can remember they expect it to
| essentially be reviewed like any other Java contribution from an
| engineer and receive minor tweaks, and they're expecting to
| translate millions of lines of code with it.
|
| There's also MicroFocus, a company who build JVM COBOL, with all
| of the implementation/CPU specific bugs, so that you can move
| everything on to JVM (or maybe even CLR I think?) and then start
| replacing pieces with Java/C#.
|
| It's not unreasonable for a company or organisation around since
| the 60s to have this sort of stuff around, however with all the
| modern options available today, it's pretty unreasonable for them
| to not have a convincing modernisation plan.
| galangalalgol wrote:
| Are there any reasonably fast emulator for the system 360? It
| seems like ridding yourself of vendor lock would be goal one.
| Then add an interface wrapper that logs inputs and outputs for
| several years to build validation tests for any ports or
| upgrades.
|
| It seems like a truly insane effort to port 20e6 lines of
| assembly and expect to get identical behavior. I doubt the
| current behavior is even fully documented. Ensuring identical
| outputs for a _lot_ of recorded data seems at least slightly
| more valid than trying to go back to documentation or
| requirements.
|
| Perhaps the simplest way to migrate the IRS code is to make the
| laws simple enough you don't need 20e6 lines of assembly to
| implement it anymore?
| pdntspa wrote:
| Provided the 360 CPU is well-enough documented, I don't see
| the problem here?
| agentbellnorm wrote:
| With enough saved input/output data, maybe some parts could
| even be replaced by a ml model?
|
| Not 100% serious but then again seems like serious resources
| are put into this problem, so maybe worth a try
| kadoban wrote:
| An AI-aided translation might make more sense, since at
| least you could review that for correctness and it'd likely
| be easier+cheaper to run the result.
| jmartrican wrote:
| I wonder if an AI system for the IRS would use double
| float or big decimal types to do its math.
| ThinkBeat wrote:
| > The US DOD have built a COBOL to Java transpile
|
| I think it would be a hard challenge to create such a beast,
| But did they also have to create a huge framework around it so
| that the Java could could interact with the same environment as
| the COBOL code?
|
| That seems like a hard challenge as well.
| YetAnotherNick wrote:
| I would say it is Jacquard's Loom which uses punched card
| programs to weave patterns. It was invented 200 years back[0] and
| I could find one video about 100 year old machine used
| commercially[1].
|
| [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MQzpLLhN0fY
|
| [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y5uX143hx38
| Step888 wrote:
| I would say that RNA is a lot older than Jacquard's Loom.
|
| And it is still actively used.
| anonymouskimmer wrote:
| Biology isn't software. I say this as a biologist.
|
| Software like things can be done with it, but this is no
| different than treating a bunch of pipes, valves, and a water
| source as a computer. (Edit to add: Which would make our
| sewers the oldest hardware system. And I'm sure there are
| supercentenarians still pumping software through those
| systems.)
|
| I imagine that many physicists feel about physics envy the
| same way I feel about imagining biology as software.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physics_envy
|
| Maybe someday we'll have a grand unified theory of everything
| imaginable and real. But even then distinctions should be
| made between levels of emergent phenomena. A habitable
| environment allows biology to exist. Biology allows
| intelligent beings to exist. Intelligent beings create tools
| that allow them to make even more tools that do predictable,
| or otherwise defined, sequences based on various inputs.
| Hardware is two levels above biology, and software is a level
| above that.
| psychoslave wrote:
| >Hardware is two levels above biology, and software is a
| level above that.
|
| From a conceptual point of view that can be grabbed by some
| human mind, this all make perfect sense.
|
| However, these hierarchies tell more about our way to
| handle sensedata than it reveals of the actual structure of
| the universe, if this does match anything relevant past our
| thoughts.
| anonymouskimmer wrote:
| I'm not normally a hierarchical or categorical thinker,
| though I do like thinking of things as built up from
| other things.
|
| It's important to recognize what thinking modality is
| best fit for a particular idea. You could instead
| describe this as a line of entropy. A pre-requisite
| chain. A web of interconnections. Whatever. And certainly
| it's grossly simplistic to describe it the way I did as
| being "two levels above", when these levels are based
| only on ad hoc categorical conveniences.
|
| I agree with you. My describing it this way was a matter
| of convenience to describe an underlying truth of
| required precursors. When we have Von Neumann machines
| capable of evolving their code the link between software
| and the DNA/RNA system will be a better analogy than it
| is now. But an analogy is not an equivalence.
| rdlw wrote:
| Are the same patterns punched into the cards as 100 years ago?
| This record is about software.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| Some nonsense about having to run old assembler on IBM hardware.
| There are simulators these days, which would run many times
| faster on modern hardware.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| This is downvoted, is it wrong? It would be very surprising to
| me if it weren't emulated.
| layer8 wrote:
| There might be licensing issues, see
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33744285.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| I don't know, but just because it can be emulated does not
| mean it is equivalent. I have a friend who uses DOS software
| on his modern laptop and laments that it was faster running
| natively on a 486.
| DrBazza wrote:
| There I was thinking my 90s code at Megabank that's still running
| was an achievement. Fwiw it was and still is a simple time series
| db.
| jeffrallen wrote:
| Why can't they just.. nah, I'll stop there. :)
| jamal-kumar wrote:
| Oh wow, I was clicking this link wondering if it was going to be
| exactly this. Karsten Nohl has a great CCC talk all about this
| [1] (I'll just copy their explanation of the talk)
|
| Becoming a secret travel agent.
|
| Travel booking systems are among the oldest global IT
| infrastructures, and have changed surprisingly little since the
| 80s. The personal information contained in these systems is hence
| not well secured by today's standards. This talk shows real-world
| hacking risks from tracking travelers to stealing flights.
|
| Airline reservation systems grew from mainframes with green-
| screen terminals to modern-looking XML/SOAP APIs to access those
| same mainframes.
|
| The systems lack central concepts of IT security, in particular
| good authentication and proper access control.
|
| We show how these weaknesses translate into disclosure of
| traveler's personal information and would allow several forms of
| fraud and theft, if left unfixed.
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vjRkpQever4
| earksiinni wrote:
| If you could pick any language to migrate these programs to,
| which one would you pick and why?
|
| I've never used Java professionally, but that's probably what I'd
| pick. Seems to hit the sweet spot between time-tested, widely-
| used, enterprise-proven, performant, future-proof/portable, and
| well-understood. Seems from another comment that's what US DOD is
| betting on, as well.
| ben_roeder wrote:
| This is a great talk on it
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8_t41xvPp1w from systems we love
| bumby wrote:
| Makes me think of the Ship of Theseus.[1] How many changes can
| you make to legacy code and still consider it "legacy"?
|
| [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| Even if you replace every board in the ship, it's still
| constrained by its original design. These software systems
| could be similar in that even if every line of code were
| replaced, architectural patterns, file formats, etc. that were
| created for the original system will continue to influence the
| current design.
| bumby wrote:
| > _Even if you replace every board in the ship, it 's still
| constrained by its original design._
|
| Is it though? Or are you assuming it has to be replaced life-
| for-like? If so, why don't we apply the same to software? I
| don't think that constraint is a given with hardware. Is a
| remodeled house constrained by it's original design? It seems
| to come down to how much you want to invest in "refactoring"
| the old house.
|
| Your comment made me think of the evolution of the F/A-18.
| The new variants are utterly different than their original,
| yet are still technically the same airframe.
| 3-cheese-sundae wrote:
| In many places, infinitely many; legacy is just a convenient
| word meaning "we know it's old and bad, but we're keeping it."
| chinabot wrote:
| And its worked for 60 years. I would take that over anything
| else.
| wildzzz wrote:
| Legacy doesn't always mean bad. It may have an older
| architecture or have some constraints that aren't always a
| problem. I work a few different product designs but they
| almost all come from a legacy product. It's not a bad legacy
| design, it does what it's supposed to within the environment
| it was designed for. Customers still buy the legacy design.
| It's cheaper and doesn't have the flexibility or add-on
| features of the newer designs so if they don't want them or
| can't use them, they'll buy the legacy product.
| bumby wrote:
| > _"we know it's old..."_
|
| I think the point I was trying to make is if a substantial
| amount has been changed, on what basis is it still considered
| "old"?
|
| If every plank and nail of the ship is replaced during it's
| voyage, is it still the same "old" ship that disembarked?
| jll29 wrote:
| Philosophical Gedankenspiele aside, there are differences
| between a ship and software. I can best speak to the
| software side, as I'm not a man of the sea. For once, a
| ship has to carry its own weight, so you cannot without
| limit load more and more onto it, or replace parts by
| heavier parts. With software "evolving" (rather poor but
| common terminology, I know) in tandem with new hardware, on
| the other hand, programmers get more space and faster
| processing every year, so they are less constrained and can
| postpone radical but scary/risky refactoring. There is no
| force to radically take out old code, you can comment out a
| bit here and there and add lots of new fixes and
| extensions, increasing complexity and technical debt every
| year, every decade. The OP also mentioned underfunding of
| the organization, typically the budgets only permit small
| incremental changes to "keep the ship running": there is no
| possibility to start a fresh/modern implementation with a
| separate team in parallel due to the mind-boggling cost.
|
| It would be interesting to run a diff of snapshots of any
| software in 1960 and its 2060 version, if e.g. SABRE or the
| IRS system may last that long.
| [deleted]
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Early in my career, I was offered a job, writing a word processor
| system in IBM 360 Assembler.
|
| I'm fairly glad I declined.
| pjmlp wrote:
| It is more fun than dealing with AT&T x86 Assembly.
| the_only_law wrote:
| Shit I'd be willing to work in mainframe assembler. Not like my
| career was going anywhere anyway, but most mainframe jobs
| either want established domain experts (people who have been
| there for decades and are intimately familiar with all the
| common mainframe technologies) or new grads they can underpay.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I suspect I was the latter, but I had already had quite a bit
| of experience with machine code and assembly (8085, 6800,
| 6502), by then.
| jaqalopes wrote:
| For those viewing the comments before the article, be advised
| that it is not the case--as my not-yet-awake brain first thought
| on parsing this headline--that the software system belonging to
| the Guinness World Records is the oldest in continuous use.
| ska wrote:
| >For those viewing the comments before the article
|
| ... any confusion is obviously your own fault
| ZeljkoS wrote:
| The wiki history of SABRE is an interesting read:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabre_(travel_reservation_syst...
|
| There is also an entry on IRS Individual Master File, but is
| short on information:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Individual_Master_File
| deepspace wrote:
| That brings back memories. In the late 90s, I travelled a lot,
| and managed to get an "Eaasy SABRE" account, which allowed me
| to book flights essentially like a travel agent, with a UI only
| slightly better than the one they used.
|
| I remember spending whole evenings piecing together flights for
| a round-the-world trip at lowest cost. There was little or no
| error checking. I once almost booked a flight to Sydney, Nova
| Scotia, instead of the one down under.
|
| Then, tragically, Travelocity shut down the service, leaving
| their crappy web-based frontend as the only online booking
| option until ITA came along.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| wow, sounds neat. how was payment handled for booking?
| deepspace wrote:
| IIRC, the service cost a small monthly fee, so you had to
| have a credit card on file with them. It may have been
| possible to just charge the booking fees to that credit
| card. However, I seem to recall there being a payment
| dialog at the end of the process, where you were prompted
| to enter a credit card number for payment.
| dmitrygr wrote:
| I am willing to rewrite ALL the irs software in a language of
| their choice in return for ability to add a few lines of my own
| logic for when MY taxes are being processed. IRS, call me ;)
| komali2 wrote:
| I'm skeptical because Guinness World Records is a marketing
| agency masquerading as a ratings house / record keeper.
|
| I googled "oldest software still in use" and the rest of the
| internet think it's MOCAS, the USA DOD contract management
| software, launched in 1958, two years earlier than Guinness'
| earliest guess for either of its options mentioned in the
| article: https://fossbytes.com/mocas-worlds-oldest-computer-
| program/
|
| Sorry to be "that guy" but I'm just really cynical about Guinness
| and records in general. Plenty of their records really are just
| fun, and I can't find a profit angle for this article for either
| the IRS or whoever manages SABRE, so I guess I'm just being a
| snark.
| kwertyoowiyop wrote:
| Agreed. I would trust them regarding the world's largest
| burrito or sourest lemon, but not this.
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| Generally I feel the "Guinness World Records" is "valuable" in
| that "somebody somewhere put _some_ level of thought and rigour
| into some record I would never have even realized existed ".
|
| Not an absolute definitive agency, and when there EXISTS a more
| official agency, take those; but it's a fun read of "these are
| reasonably close to the extreme in this obscure area I never
| thought of"
| jdsully wrote:
| It was invented by a beer company to help settle debates in a
| pub. Guinness records are just a fun thing to appreciate even
| if not perfect.
| nemomarx wrote:
| It could be PR for the IRS? A bit of public attention to make a
| play for funding to replace or upgrade this system, etc?
| 0xcde4c3db wrote:
| > Guinness World Records is a marketing agency masquerading as
| a ratings house / record keeper
|
| In case this is news to anybody, the basic shape of the grift
| is that while anyone can theoretically apply for a record and
| submit proof, the requirements are fairly stringent and
| complex. And wouldn't you know it, Guinness World Records
| offers various levels of "consulting" on setting/breaking a
| record, including defining the record to break, setting up an
| event, and flying out an adjudicator to witness the record
| being broken.
| charcircuit wrote:
| To clarify, by defining a record to break that includes
| making up new categories so that you automatically get the
| world record by being the only competitor. There are also
| records like "First Rubik's Cube", which are impossible to
| beat.
| lioeters wrote:
| I for one appreciate your "but actually" comment, the
| relentless pursuit of facts over fluff.
|
| As an aside, I always thought "snark" was a real word, but
| apparently it's a neologism meaning "snide or sarcastic
| remark". It's also the name of various fictional creatures,
| including The Hunting of the Snark by Lewis Carroll, as well as
| in A Song of Ice and Fire.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snark
| Terretta wrote:
| You're right to be cynical.
|
| I have had 'continuously running' software system in house as
| old as they reference. From first hand experience, I'd imagine
| it's not something folks are crowing about.
|
| Your reference is older than what I had in house.
| johnklos wrote:
| It's funny how if you ask people about forward-looking systems
| today, they have either learned mistruths or haven't learned
| enough about the history of computing to picture much that's
| reasonable.
|
| "Java!" used to be talked about as a good way to create software
| that you could run in the future, but anyone who has had to keep
| around old laptops / old VMs to run ancient Java to handle KVMs
| or device management tools knows how ridiculous an expectation
| about the stability of Java can be.
|
| "Windows!" is funny, because I can't tell you the number of
| places that have an ancient Windows PC that has either been
| repaired or carefully replaced with new enough, yet old enough
| hardware to still run Windows 2000 or XP, because copy protection
| is stupid, and / or because drivers for specific hardware can't
| be updated or run on newer Windows, and / or because the software
| can't be compiled and run on newer Windows without tons of work.
|
| On the other hand, you can take large, complicated programs from
| the 1980s written in C and compile them on a modern Unix computer
| without issues, even when the modern computer is running
| architectures which hadn't even been dreamt of when the software
| was written...
| xboxnolifes wrote:
| Windows is a particularly funny one, considering how quick the
| advice for most issues turns to doing a fresh install. It's a
| very brittle black box once you try to do any amount of changes
| from default settings.
| brazzy wrote:
| > "Java!" used to be talked about as a good way to create
| software that you could run in the future, but anyone who has
| had to keep around old laptops / old VMs to run ancient Java to
| handle KVMs or device management tools knows how ridiculous an
| expectation about the stability of Java can be.
|
| Hard disagree. In my 20 years of experience, Java is very,
| very, _extremely_ stable and backwards-compatible.
|
| I would absolutely expect Java bytecode compiled in 1996 on
| Java 1.1 to have a very good chance to run without errors on a
| brand new Java 20 JVM, and source code from that time to
| compile with some very minor adjustments such as changing
| identifiers that clash with newly introduced keywords.
| Ironically, the older the code, the less likely it is to have
| problems with the post-Java 8 breaking changes.
|
| But you talk about "handling KVMs or device management tools" -
| that's hardware stuff not covered by Java's standard API, so it
| will involve native code. _That_ will bring you compatibility
| problems, not Java. Admittedly, that could be seen as Java
| avoiding the hard problems rather than solving them.
|
| > On the other hand, you can take large, complicated programs
| from the 1980s written in C and compile them on a modern Unix
| computer without issues, even when the modern computer is
| running architectures which hadn't even been dreamt of when the
| software was written...
|
| I want some of what you're smoking. Toy programs, sure. But
| nothing that does any kind of hardware interfacing (notice a
| theme?) or uses any but the most trivial syscalls (this would
| be pre POSIX), or makes any of a myriad common assumptions
| about hardware architecture (see
| https://catb.org/jargon/html/V/vaxocentrism.html). So how many
| large, complicated programs does that really leave?
| johnklos wrote:
| Good point about Java, even though talking to KVMs over the
| network and displaying a GUI isn't really hardware stuff.
|
| But I think you're forgetting how much code is written to
| C89. How much of bash, for instance, is ancient, with updates
| that avoid newer toolchain features so that it can be as
| portable as possible?
|
| Yes, people don't often write stuff with portability as a
| goal at the beginning, but once something is relatively
| portable, it stays that way. Lots of code that wasn't poorly
| written made it from all-the-world's-a-VAX to i386, from i386
| to amd64, and now ARM and aarch64, with a minimum of extra
| effort. There just had to be a little effort to NOT program
| like a jerk, which, as funny as it is, is still an issue now.
|
| I'm running Pine as my daily email program, which was written
| in 1989 and hasn't had any real updates since 2005. New
| architecture? Compile it. Lots of modern software started out
| as C software from the 1980s.
| choeger wrote:
| I think we simply underestimate the cost of software maintenance
| because we ignore software maintenance.
|
| Migration to a new language is nothing but an extreme form of
| maintenance. And it's not even _that_ expensive. We 're just used
| to scales of a dozen or so programmers at best.
|
| As a very conservative estimate, translation from assembly to,
| say, Java, should proceed at the pace of maybe 100 lines per day
| on average. So a team of 100 developers would need a year or so
| to translate a 20M lines application. Of course, there's also the
| effort to create tooling and the framework of the new
| application, but it's certainly doable.
| rippercushions wrote:
| Sabre announced a 10-year deal with Google to migrate to the
| cloud. Coming soon, containerized microservices running
| System/360 assembler?
|
| https://www.sabre.com/insights/releases/sabre-forges-10-year...
| wbl wrote:
| Wasn't that just system 360? It had a fairly high level of
| isolation between services possible.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| It seems we've come... full circle.
| genmud wrote:
| Yea, it was pretty dope for its time.
| chasd00 wrote:
| Isn't that tide prediction analog computer implemented with ropes
| and pulleys and invented before electricity still running in some
| places?
| ben_w wrote:
| While that might count as "a computer", it definitely doesn't
| count as "software".
| tomohawk wrote:
| > the low level of funding the IRS has had for modernization
|
| The IRS has been trying to modernize for decades.
|
| Here's something from way back in the Clinton admin:
|
| https://clintonwhitehouse4.archives.gov/pcscb/rmo_irs.html
|
| But you'll never hear anyone there actually be responsible for
| the failures. They'll always whine about needing even more money.
| johnklos wrote:
| The failures are due to the fact that the people who can get
| contracts don't have good programmers, and the people who have
| good programmers can't get contracts.
| yesiamyourdad wrote:
| I worked at AA/Sabre in the mid 90s, straight out of college,
| although I was working on the PC side on the software they put in
| travel agencies. I left just after AA spun Sabre off into a
| separate public company. The mainframe software was done in TPF
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transaction_Processing_Facilit...)
| and I believe to this day a large part of it still is. IBM
| created a C compiler some time in the late 90s and this was
| considered a major advance for the platform. I believe that the
| system still runs on TPF with some parts written in C. Those
| programming jobs were not typical CS grads, most people simply
| had a HS degree or some college that could pass a logic test, the
| company had to provide their own training because there was no
| other way to gain experience with that environment.
|
| On the subject of emulation, Sabre also had acquired a company
| called Agency Data Systems which was written for a Data General
| minicomputer using a language developed in-house. The guy who
| invented the language was named Hugh, so internally this was
| called "HUBOL" (the actual name was something else that only Hugh
| actually could remember). Some time in the 80s they decided to
| port it to a PC architecture but instead of porting ADS to a more
| modern language, they decided to build a DG emulator to run on a
| PC. When I was there, they were still updating the HUBOL source
| code (Y2K was a big deal at the time, plus with changes in the
| travel business, the updates were constant) but running on the
| homegrown DG emulator on a MS-DOS system. Hugh was quite a
| character. Back then we still had to wear a shirt and tie to work
| and Hugh's shirts all had these breast pockets that were stuffed
| with odd slips of paper. The joke was that he had run every
| project he'd worked on in the previous 30 years out of his shirt
| pocket, given the way things operated, there was probably some
| truth to that.
|
| Somebody linked to Adam Fletcher's talk. Adam co-founded ITA
| which was eventually acquired by Google and probably is the basis
| for Google Flights. I saw a demo in probably early 1997 when they
| came around the startup I worked at looking for customers. Their
| software was written in Lisp and ran on a PC and was completely
| jaw-dropping. I never realized how bad Sabre's pricing software
| was until I saw what they were doing. ITA absolutely was the best
| pricing engine around at the time. In retrospect I probably
| should have quit my job and begged those guys to hire me.
| bdcravens wrote:
| I worked in their HR department in 2000 and 2001, building
| various systems to support compensation, performance review,
| etc. Significant part of the role involved working with DBAs
| who pulled data from those systems into our RDBMS, as we were
| using web languages of the day.
| eep_social wrote:
| > Adam co-founded ITA which was eventually acquired by Google
| and probably is the basis for Google Flights
|
| This is an absolutely wild pair of claims. Adam was nothing
| like (and does not claim to be) a co-founder and google flights
| is driven entirely by ITAs QPX product. ITA was a very good
| place to work.
| p_l wrote:
| It's possible that the reason there was no C for TPF is similar
| to why C arrived very, very late to CICS on S/390 (or z
| architecture).
|
| Namely, C standard library was not reentrant safe, with
| considerable global variables et al - and the code on CICS (and
| I suspect TPF) had to be fully reentrant because it effectively
| ran inside green threads.
|
| So, unless IBM wanted to advertise C that wouldn't contain
| standard standard library, modules written in C would be
| possibly dangerously playing with global side effects.
| Relatively recently this was solved by common runtime component
| whose name eludes me at this time, which underlies standard run
| times for C/C++ and I think Java, at least inside CICS
| chx wrote:
| There was a protocol document which showed at least the data
| structures of the original IBM 7074 survive. I wouldn't be
| surprised at all if some of the machine code would survive as
| well, emulated easily.
| jedberg wrote:
| Imagine congress passed a law funding software upgrades for the
| IRS that came along with a bunch of tax code changes to
| "streamline" the upgrade process.
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| > As much as 20 million lines of the IMF's code is reportedly
| written in Assembler - a major obstacle to any modernization
|
| That's literally jobs for life for some (un)lucky team.
| dhosek wrote:
| Oh man, I can remember product owners asking for something that
| wasn't what they really wanted because they thought what they
| wanted would be hard to implement, but of course what they
| really wanted was easier to do than what they asked for.
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| This happens all the time.
|
| A decade ago, a family friend with a band wanted help with
| burning their CDs.
|
| Timidly, "hat in hand, eyes down", they asked if I could
| maybe, possibly, add 2 seconds of silence in front of their
| recorded tracks? It's OK if I couldn't, they'd understand.
|
| "I finished it while we were talking"
|
| "Really?? Amazing!! That's awesome! Didn't know you could do
| that!!
|
| Now, can you also remove John's guitar from this song?"
|
| They really had no clue that removing an instrument from a
| finished mix is _HARD_ , as opposed to adding 2 seconds of
| silence (and for context this was years before the current
| deluge of "AI Powered" apps that might conceivably actually
| do that).
| increscent wrote:
| Reminds me of this: https://xkcd.com/1425/
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