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The code is from the 1970s, but a lot of the hardware has been replaced over the years. IBM has been pretty aggressive about maintaining compatibility options b

The code is from the 1970s, but a lot of the hardware has been replaced over the years. IBM has been pretty aggressive about maintaining compatibility options because they're fully aware of just how much legacy code their customers need to use. And when it hasn't been, maintenance has usually been pretty well-handled. Those machines were usually built to last. There's even a company that was still using an IBM 402 accounting machine as of 2012.[0] And there's plenty of military hardware using 70s/80s computer tech. But I don't see this ever really coming to consumer attention. They're never directly--or visibly--interacting with old mainframes. From their perspective, they're using the newest tech. The mainframe in the background doesn't exist to them. If they even think about it, it's just magic. The closest you might have gotten to the public talking about legacy systems was probably the healthcare.gov debacle, when a number of news articles mentioned integration issues as being an problem. Those were big issues in themselves, but they weren't the main problem behind the site's development nor were they ever a major discussion point. 0. http://www.pcworld.com/article/249951/computers/if-it-aint-broke-dont-fix-it-ancient-computers-in-use-today.html http://www.pcworld.com/article/249951/computers/if-it-aint-b...

kristianc 10y ago
Here in the U.K. at least, banks using legacy systems is usually mentioned when a bank has an outage / ATMs failing. The canonical example when it comes to UK banking is the RBS outage, which meant that customers could not make payments for three weeks. RBS was hit with a £56m fine for that. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/epic/rbs/11242479/RBS-hit-with-56m-fine-for-IT-breakdown.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/epic/rbs/112...
- insomniacity 10y ago
  And this right here is the reason that banks can't just sit on their ticking timebombs. Another commenter says there's no incentive for managers or execs to stick their necks out, but £56m is quite an incentive.
  - Bluestrike2 10y ago
    Not really, because the risk of such a fine is ridiculously low. From reading up on the incident, it seems like it was more a matter of a software update rather than specifically the use of legacy code that caused the incident. UBS was fined because the outages were unacceptable to consumers and regulators and because "the potential for problems had been raised in an internal audit two years before the incident took place in 2012"[0] and nothing was done. One could argue that legacy code makes that more likely because of unseen factors that predate the people actively working on it. It's hard to miss a landmine, after all, if you don't have any clue that it's there. But while a rewrite might eliminate that specific risk, it does so by inviting a lot of new ones to replace it. In some ways, the risks are probably greater as you need to figure out possibly decades of business logic and then re-implement everything. From a business decision perspective, the existence of legacy code on its own is an insufficient argument on its own. After all, the problems inherent in legacy code will eventually surface yet again in another 10-15 years anyhow. The better solution in most cases would be to identify specific problems and determine what can be done to hedge against them. 0. https://www.theguardian.com/business/2014/nov/20/royal-bank-of-scotland-it-breakdown-56m-pounds-fine https://www.theguardian.com/business/2014/nov/20/royal-bank-...

kristianc 10y ago

Here in the U.K. at least, banks using legacy systems is usually mentioned when a bank has an outage / ATMs failing. The canonical example when it comes to UK banking is the RBS outage, which meant that customers could not make payments for three weeks. RBS was hit with a £56m fine for that. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/epic/rbs/11242479/RBS-hit-with-56m-fine-for-IT-breakdown.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/epic/rbs/112...

insomniacity 10y ago
And this right here is the reason that banks can't just sit on their ticking timebombs. Another commenter says there's no incentive for managers or execs to stick their necks out, but £56m is quite an incentive.
- Bluestrike2 10y ago
  Not really, because the risk of such a fine is ridiculously low. From reading up on the incident, it seems like it was more a matter of a software update rather than specifically the use of legacy code that caused the incident. UBS was fined because the outages were unacceptable to consumers and regulators and because "the potential for problems had been raised in an internal audit two years before the incident took place in 2012"[0] and nothing was done. One could argue that legacy code makes that more likely because of unseen factors that predate the people actively working on it. It's hard to miss a landmine, after all, if you don't have any clue that it's there. But while a rewrite might eliminate that specific risk, it does so by inviting a lot of new ones to replace it. In some ways, the risks are probably greater as you need to figure out possibly decades of business logic and then re-implement everything. From a business decision perspective, the existence of legacy code on its own is an insufficient argument on its own. After all, the problems inherent in legacy code will eventually surface yet again in another 10-15 years anyhow. The better solution in most cases would be to identify specific problems and determine what can be done to hedge against them. 0. https://www.theguardian.com/business/2014/nov/20/royal-bank-of-scotland-it-breakdown-56m-pounds-fine https://www.theguardian.com/business/2014/nov/20/royal-bank-...