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There are certainly places in the world, today, where machines from the 60s-70s-80s are running critical processes, and all the original people involved in desi
by TrackerFF 6y ago
There are certainly places in the world, today, where machines from the 60s-70s-80s are running critical processes, and all the original people involved in design and implementation are either dead or retired - so you're stuck with technicians that only have repair manuals, along with spare parts of everything. Bespoke, one-of-a-kind circuits / machines / etc.
- solipsism 6y agoEven if that's true, those are exceptional examples. They're rare. So why should we care?
- cinntaile 6y agoOld IBM mainframes in banks and government institutions aren't that rare I think. But I don't have any numbers to back this up.
- inter_netuser 6y agonot rare at all. COBOL still runs the world, despite what many on this board think.
- otabdeveloper4 6y agoCOBOL is rare outside the USA and Western Europe, I'm pretty sure.
- inter_netuser 6y agocentral banks all over are running on IBM.
- lumost 6y agoThey are a sign of a deficiency in the tech business model. Maintenance is a bad business, and so the only way to keep things understood and working is to build new things. This is fine as long as the "in maintenance only" portion of the industry remains small. Which will only remain true while the industry is growing exponentially. However like industrials, there will eventually be a physical limit to how much better computer networks, microchips, web search, cameras and other activities can get. Once this happens growth in the core parts of the industry will slow, and more software will be in maintenance. However software components are both opaque and orders of magnitude more complex than physical parts. As an example, Losing practical knowledge of the linux kernel involves losing knowledge of ~27.8 million lines of code. There may come a time in a number of decades that getting a driver patched is an impractical activity due to the scarcity of knowledge ( or potentially even the ability to build the driver... )
- nradov 6y agoLinux drivers are already a mess, and have been since the beginning. But the problem is due to IP concerns by hardware vendors, not a lack of knowledge about the code base.
- lumost 6y agowhich makes the problem more likely to emerge when the various hardware companies stop developing new drivers due to lack of significant new hardware evolution. e.g. why update the nic drivers if the nic hasn't changed in 20 years? this could easily turn into "how do we even modify and release our companies nic driver?"
- andrey_utkin 6y ago> Maintenance is a bad business Could you please elaborate why? I would agree that such business has relatively low ROI. Still, for example, Linux distros and *BSD foundations are to an extent a maintenance business.
- jsymolon 6y agoOperational Budget vs Capitalize Budget, for one. Build something new, affect bottom line directly vs maintenance. Blame the tax structure for placing an emphasis on new.
- hyperman1 6y agoThis is actually good news. It provides a lever for the government to change our entire culture (in a good way). Much easier than convincing every individual that maintenance is required.
- andrey_utkin 6y agoOr bad news, that the govt's unreasonable bias is the reason why it is the optimal economic behavior to neglect maintenance?
- pjerem 6y agoAlas, those rare examples does includes nuclear power plants.
- AnthonyMouse 6y agoThat is probably less of a concern than most other things because the industry is so highly regulated that everything is formally specified and documented. Now guess what happens if we forget how to make something intrinsic to modern farming.
- mellavora 6y agolike dirt? Not being snarky; just want to point out that current soil erosion rates due to modern farming mean the world will run out of dirt by the end of the century. http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2015/ph240/verso2/ http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2015/ph240/verso2/ https://world.time.com/2012/12/14/what-if-the-worlds-soil-runs-out/ https://world.time.com/2012/12/14/what-if-the-worlds-soil-ru... https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/may/30/topsoil-farming-agriculture-food-toxic-america https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/may/30/topsoil-farm...
- jfoutz 6y agoReliance on deprecated behavior, but without the compiler warning. There may be some hidden risk out there, and we have no idea how much it'll cost to fix or replace. The example that springs to mind is the social security check printers. I think they wound up reading the wire voltages as checks were printing to duplicate the behavior for the y2k fix. Was urgent as many people relied on that income. There are rare events that you can't do much about up front, they're external. A pandemic might be a good example. There are other rare events you can simply avoid, but it's often tempting to just skip the maintenance and let someone else deal with it when it breaks. It's rare right? Not like we're going to get blamed, or even be around to have to deal with it.
- grogenaut 6y agoYou're not stuck with it, you just have decided that's cheaper than replacing it.
- XorNot 6y agoIt's the problem of keeping things in living memory. The craziest thing about human civilization is every 75 years or so, we have to complete a 100% knowledge transfer of everything we know to a new set of humans who start out not knowing anything about it. Obviously it's a little more complex then that, but the importance and value of education and documentation is very much in that realm: drop the next generation in a desert, and we go back to the stone age instantly.
- WrtCdEvrydy 6y agoEveryone wants the new shiny thing but writing things down is how we got to where we are today.
- CiceroCiceronis 6y agoCixin Liu’s SF novel “The Supernova Era,” in which a supernova irradiates the earth in such a way that everyone above the age of 13 will die in a year, takes this as its focus.
- pkdpic_y9k 6y agoOh man, got stuck half way through that one for some reason but hadnt thought of it from that angle somehow. Im inspired to pick it back up... Like right now.
- pjmlp 6y agoWhich is why when we happen to dig out some form of document from 5000 years ago, and eventually translate, we end up discovering that besides technology and religion of the day, the society was somehow pretty much the same.
- nradov 6y agoYou're probably thinking of the oldest written customer complaint, from 1750 BC. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complaint_tablet_to_Ea-nasir?wprov=sfla1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complaint_tablet_to_Ea-nasir?w...
- drdeadringer 6y ago> so you're stuck with technicians that only have repair manuals, along with spare parts of everything Tell me more about how people hate writing documentation, and then tell me how they can't shut the fuck up about not having it when they need it. This is a peeve of mine. What do you expect?
- bawolff 6y agoWhat's so surprising about it? I hate cleaning my apt but also hate when its dirty. There's no big contradiction here.
- a_t48 6y agoIf only I could pay someone to write the documentation for me.
- sharken 6y agoYou would still have to explain to someone what it is that should be documented. A better approach is to learn just enough to do it yourself, but it's not easy to document things well. I like to think about documentation like this: Without it your work will be almost wasted as nobody can make use of it. That helps a bit :)
- a_t48 6y agoThus the "if only" - I can pay someone else to clean my place pretty well, but I can't really pay someone to take knowledge out of my head.
- totetsu 6y agoLast time I cleaned my apt I managed to delete my grub conf somehow and had to spend the day learning to manually mount an encrypted zfs pool. Luckily I have some etc keeper thing that keeps a git log of all changes to my conf files so I could restore it.
- seangrogg 6y ago
- titzer 6y agoThe problem isn't that these machines are from the 1960s. It's that we stopped making machines like that. I'm sure someone somewhere along the line convinced someone that it'd be better to do it all over from scratch, but if these machines lasted 60 years, then they can't be all bad. In Italy, there are textile manufacturers that use looms that were built in the 1920s and still make cloth perfectly well, just like the old times. We do this all the time with technology. It's because we're addicted to change, and we have no judgment about how much change we need and where.
- ta1234567890 6y ago> we're addicted to change, and we have no judgment about how much change we need and where. ^ this
- nradov 6y agoThat scenario isn't caused by an addiction to change. It's just not economically viable to continue manufacturing obsolete equipment for a shrinking customer base.
- zelphirkalt 6y agoAnd what causes that shrinking customer base? Apparently there is some kind of replacement, which is brought about by ... change. Whether we are addicted to change or not, might be another question though.
- pixl97 6y agoRight, just like I want to go back to a car that gets 3 gallons per mile.
- ImPostingOnHN 6y agoI agree that the problem isn't that these machines are from the 60s. They may have even been cutting edge then. Indeed, the problem is that the user of the machine faced a choice between 3 possibilities: replacing the machine as expertise in the old tech dwindled; building and maintaining that expertise over the course of decades; or doing neither, and letting the equipment inevitably lapse into its inevitable disrepair; and they chose the latter. Change is constant, which is good, because there is no progress without it. The only choice we have as individuals is how, and how well, we adapt to it.
- neatze 6y agoCuriousMarc youtube channel, to extent, contradicts your statement.
- marcus_holmes 6y agoI saw this a lot with Y2K. Suddenly all those places that had been ticking along for a couple of decades on their COBOL line-of-business systems with minor maintenance had to make some major changes. The choice, really, was "hire some ludicrously expensive COBOL devs, or replace the entire system". Replacing the entire system failed on every sane business evaluation: high-risk, hugely expensive, no guarantee that the new system will even work. So they hired the ludicrously expensive COBOL devs (because the devs needed to understand 1970's-era COBOL, and they were rare in the OO-frenzied 1990's) and patched up the old system. But as time wears on, those systems fall further and further behind, and the COBOL devs who actually know how to maintain them get more and more expensive (or actually unavailable). The costs and risks of replacing the system is still too high for any given marginal change, but the marginal changes are getting very, very expensive. And then 2038[0] rolls around and they'll face the same choice. And the same risks will come up. It'll be interesting to see what they do, and what choices are available. Because patching the old system may well not be possible at this point, because there's nobody left who understands it. And migrating the complex business logic to a new system may well not be possible, because there's no-one left who understands the old code. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem
- sigotirandolas 6y agoI don't think them falling behind is necessarily bad. Modern systems, languages and programming practices are much nicer, but they also have a lot more effort behind processors, compilers, frameworks, operating systems, etc., so overall the system is much more complex. If anything, I think having a separate, archaic, mostly frozen system base for critical infrastructure is a good thing. The current ancient COBOL abandonware situation is probably not the simple and mostly standardized solution one may wish for, but it's a lot closer.
- marcus_holmes 6y agoI'd agree, if nothing ever changed and it was feasible to run them forever. But it's not. At some point (probably 2038) the whole thing will fall over and a new system will have to replace it.