They use very broad terms to imply it was 60 year old hardware that failed but early on in the article state it was an 18 month old piece of hardware in a "syst

They use very broad terms to imply it was 60 year old hardware that failed but early on in the article state it was an 18 month old piece of hardware in a "system" that dates back to the 60s. If you dig into some of the other links and a GAO report you learn that there's two programs, the IMF and BMF, that are partially written in assembly that dates back to the 60s. They're most likely running some z/Architecture in System 360 virtualization mode.