4 ms·

Ah legacy enterprise software/hardware, it keeps me employed and insane. Where i currently work we have a system which was originally designed in '69(coding st

by mekael 11y ago

Ah legacy enterprise software/hardware, it keeps me employed and insane. Where i currently work we have a system which was originally designed in '69(coding started in 75) running on an ibm iSeries. It's old old tech and most of the system is cludged together so poorly that instead of being able to write patches we just write wrappers around the applications(micro services really) that modify the program as its running. Yeahp. We have a system written in something called "Workstation Basic" which was designed/written in '79( a decade before I was born). The original author no longer works for us and can only be contacted certain times of the year because he's a snowbird. Millions of dollars of business is done in access databases and custom made excel workbooks. It's a fun time.

siavosh 11y ago
It's an interesting time when one can build a living/breathing piece of engineering that can outlive us indefinitely.
- smeyer 11y ago
  This isn't specific to computer or software engineering, of course. There are still Roman aqueducts in use that were engineered thousands of years ago.
  - mekael 11y ago
    I'm fascinated by things like the aqueducts. The skill to make them is something i can never comprehend.
    - grayclhn 11y ago
      Overengineeing doesn't take nearly as much skill as you'd think. It would be pretty easy for any of us to design a wall that, if left alone, would last for thousands of years.
      - kragen 11y ago
        You would think, but often things fail in unexpected ways. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zinc_pest https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zinc_pest is destroying thousands of die-cast zinc-alloy toys from the 1930s to 1950s. Zinc alloys are pretty corrosion-resistant, so this was a surprise. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellulose_acetate_film#Decay_and_the_.22vinegar_syndrome.22 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellulose_acetate_film#Decay_a... is destroying a lot of historically important documents in libraries that were laminated in acetate during the 1930s to 1950s in order to preserve them. But this kind of thing sometimes happens to architectural materials, too. https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminosis https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminosis is destroying a lot of buildings in Spain in the 1960s and 1970s. I've seen a similar process underway in buildings built during the same period in Montevideo, Uruguay, but I don't know if it's from the same cause. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serpentinite#Serpentinite_reactions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serpentinite#Serpentinite_reac... will destroy stone walls pretty quickly if you build them out of olivine-rich rock. Reinforced concrete, especially in chloride-rich environments, will eventually spall from oxidation of the reinforcing minerals. Some kinds of aggregate, like dolomite, although resistant to weathering themselves, also have a tendency to slowly destroy concrete. You can definitely build a wall that will last thousands of years in the absence of earthquakes, war, gray goo, or acid rain, if you make the wall out of quartz-rich or otherwise slow-weathering, low-TCE rocks like granite, cement it with lime cement instead of Portland cement, don't try to reinforce it, and don't make it too long, thin, and straight, in order to reduce thermal-cycling stresses. Most of us would never think of most of those issues when we tried to overengineer. The Roman aqueducts have some other interesting virtues, though: due to the arch, they used very little material. We could probably do better with stainless steel today, but they did pretty darn well with masonry. I don't know if you've ever tried building a masonry arch, but there are some nonobvious considerations, and a mistake can kill you.
        Zardoz84 11y ago
        You should look to the Roman Pantheon building https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantheon,_Rome https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantheon,_Rome
  - veddox 11y ago
    We live in a time and a culture that tells us that "newer is better". But sometimes, the "ancients" weren't that stupid after all...
  - mooreds 11y ago
    More on this: http://www.romanaqueducts.info/q&a/11stillinuse.htm http://www.romanaqueducts.info/q&a/11stillinuse.htm
prawn 11y ago
I know of someone who is in the position of your snowbird, though still employed. He almost delights in the fact that there's been no effort to upgrade from something completely reliant on him, even though he knows the situation is crazy. And he has no personal interest in writing himself out of a job. I can't approve of that attitude.
- angersock 11y ago
  I can't approve of that attitude. Why not? Most companies that end up with that kind of hardcore legacy code a) refuse to upgrade on a reasonable basis and b) refuse to compensate their developers in proportion to the value they ultimately deliver. So, fuck'em. Might as well enjoy the pseudo pension.
  - nostalgiac 11y ago
    I agree. If the company has pidgeon holed themselves into the situation, they clearly have the 2 options you stated, and that should not reflect poorly on the original author.
  - prawn 11y ago
    This is in health/medical and the employee in question is nearing retirement. I'd like to think that he should be encouraging them to consider a succession plan ahead of time to minimise risk for the thousands of people likely to be effected by this. There's a good chance, from my understanding of the situation, that his managers don't understand the situation as well as he does. I think he should think bigger than himself. Management's decisions are unlikely to be budget related.
- mekael 11y ago
  The weird thing is that he's advocated ditching the application in favor of either a custom written or customized off the shelf product, it's more so that upper upper management said "if it's still making us cash, why chance it?" .
gav 11y ago
I worked with a huge multinational company that was trying to replace the system they used for planning. The system was 10s of millions of lines of 16-bit assembly code written for a minicomputer in the the mid-1970s. The next generation of 32-bit systems in the early 1980s were able to run the code, so they purchased one and kept it running to nearly 2000. They had a project that was trying to rewrite everything in C targeting the DEC Apha, but after 10 years it still wasn't ready yet. Because 80s era minicomputers sucked so much electricity, we were able to sell them new Pentium servers running SCO OpenServer that could emulate them. I always wondered if they ever got their rewrite project finished.
cm2187 11y ago
I can tell you that trillon dollars banks are also ran on spreadsheets and access database. What I don't get is that a software designed in the 60s to run on machines of the 70s surely can't be that complex. Wouldn't it be cheaper to just re-implement it? Might not even need to change the logic, just convert to a modern syntax.

by mekael 11y ago

siavosh 11y ago

It's an interesting time when one can build a living/breathing piece of engineering that can outlive us indefinitely.

smeyer 11y ago
This isn't specific to computer or software engineering, of course. There are still Roman aqueducts in use that were engineered thousands of years ago.
- mekael 11y ago
  I'm fascinated by things like the aqueducts. The skill to make them is something i can never comprehend.
  - grayclhn 11y ago
    Overengineeing doesn't take nearly as much skill as you'd think. It would be pretty easy for any of us to design a wall that, if left alone, would last for thousands of years.
    - kragen 11y ago
      You would think, but often things fail in unexpected ways. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zinc_pest https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zinc_pest is destroying thousands of die-cast zinc-alloy toys from the 1930s to 1950s. Zinc alloys are pretty corrosion-resistant, so this was a surprise. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellulose_acetate_film#Decay_and_the_.22vinegar_syndrome.22 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellulose_acetate_film#Decay_a... is destroying a lot of historically important documents in libraries that were laminated in acetate during the 1930s to 1950s in order to preserve them. But this kind of thing sometimes happens to architectural materials, too. https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminosis https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminosis is destroying a lot of buildings in Spain in the 1960s and 1970s. I've seen a similar process underway in buildings built during the same period in Montevideo, Uruguay, but I don't know if it's from the same cause. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serpentinite#Serpentinite_reactions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serpentinite#Serpentinite_reac... will destroy stone walls pretty quickly if you build them out of olivine-rich rock. Reinforced concrete, especially in chloride-rich environments, will eventually spall from oxidation of the reinforcing minerals. Some kinds of aggregate, like dolomite, although resistant to weathering themselves, also have a tendency to slowly destroy concrete. You can definitely build a wall that will last thousands of years in the absence of earthquakes, war, gray goo, or acid rain, if you make the wall out of quartz-rich or otherwise slow-weathering, low-TCE rocks like granite, cement it with lime cement instead of Portland cement, don't try to reinforce it, and don't make it too long, thin, and straight, in order to reduce thermal-cycling stresses. Most of us would never think of most of those issues when we tried to overengineer. The Roman aqueducts have some other interesting virtues, though: due to the arch, they used very little material. We could probably do better with stainless steel today, but they did pretty darn well with masonry. I don't know if you've ever tried building a masonry arch, but there are some nonobvious considerations, and a mistake can kill you.
      - Zardoz84 11y ago
        You should look to the Roman Pantheon building https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantheon,_Rome https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantheon,_Rome
- veddox 11y ago
  We live in a time and a culture that tells us that "newer is better". But sometimes, the "ancients" weren't that stupid after all...
- mooreds 11y ago
  More on this: http://www.romanaqueducts.info/q&a/11stillinuse.htm http://www.romanaqueducts.info/q&a/11stillinuse.htm

prawn 11y ago

I know of someone who is in the position of your snowbird, though still employed. He almost delights in the fact that there's been no effort to upgrade from something completely reliant on him, even though he knows the situation is crazy. And he has no personal interest in writing himself out of a job. I can't approve of that attitude.

angersock 11y ago
I can't approve of that attitude. Why not? Most companies that end up with that kind of hardcore legacy code a) refuse to upgrade on a reasonable basis and b) refuse to compensate their developers in proportion to the value they ultimately deliver. So, fuck'em. Might as well enjoy the pseudo pension.
- nostalgiac 11y ago
  I agree. If the company has pidgeon holed themselves into the situation, they clearly have the 2 options you stated, and that should not reflect poorly on the original author.
- prawn 11y ago
  This is in health/medical and the employee in question is nearing retirement. I'd like to think that he should be encouraging them to consider a succession plan ahead of time to minimise risk for the thousands of people likely to be effected by this. There's a good chance, from my understanding of the situation, that his managers don't understand the situation as well as he does. I think he should think bigger than himself. Management's decisions are unlikely to be budget related.
mekael 11y ago
The weird thing is that he's advocated ditching the application in favor of either a custom written or customized off the shelf product, it's more so that upper upper management said "if it's still making us cash, why chance it?" .

gav 11y ago

I worked with a huge multinational company that was trying to replace the system they used for planning. The system was 10s of millions of lines of 16-bit assembly code written for a minicomputer in the the mid-1970s. The next generation of 32-bit systems in the early 1980s were able to run the code, so they purchased one and kept it running to nearly 2000. They had a project that was trying to rewrite everything in C targeting the DEC Apha, but after 10 years it still wasn't ready yet. Because 80s era minicomputers sucked so much electricity, we were able to sell them new Pentium servers running SCO OpenServer that could emulate them. I always wondered if they ever got their rewrite project finished.

cm2187 11y ago

I can tell you that trillon dollars banks are also ran on spreadsheets and access database. What I don't get is that a software designed in the 60s to run on machines of the 70s surely can't be that complex. Wouldn't it be cheaper to just re-implement it? Might not even need to change the logic, just convert to a modern syntax.