4 ms·

And so do several U.K. high street banks, written in COBOL for the PDP-11, run via an emulation layer of an AS/400, last I stuck my head into that particular he

And so do several U.K. high street banks, written in COBOL for the PDP-11, run via an emulation layer of an AS/400, last I stuck my head into that particular hell, and I doubt much has changed.

lbourdages 2y ago
At least those who started on a System 360 can run some applications essentially unmodified on modern hardware... The bus factor on that PDP-11 software must be uncomfortably low.
mastazi 2y ago
> last I stuck my head into that particular hell I don't think it's hell if you like retrocomputing. Personally I find it fascinating. In the past I sometimes had to work on legacy systems and I liked playing the archeologist role. Maybe you are not referring to the platform, but rather to code quality. But I have found some a lot of jumbled messy React code in early stage startups, and some decent code in legacy systems I have worked on, so I guess code quality is not always directly related to age of the system...
- madaxe_again 2y ago
  I like retro computing - and this ain’t it. This is consultants gouging their clients, and a cultish “we don’t touch that” inherited through generations of management. To be clear, parts of it are in COBOL. Other bits are in RPG, others yet in PL/1, and then a generous application of java, c++, windows shell scripts, unix shell scripts, and it’s all held together with TSVs. It’s more like hoarding than anything else - “don’t touch that, it might be useful, I don’t know, just leave it as it is, we’ll get eleven new servers for whatever it is that it does” In the end we gave them a pile of python that ingested malformatted EDIs that another system made and spat out TSVs so that same system could then not trip over its own shoelaces.
  - mastazi 2y ago
    Ah, makes sense, yeah that's not what I had pictured, and it seems like it's not fun at all!
jen729w 2y ago
I got an insight in to why this is the case in 2012, when I had the misfortune to be part of the worst project I've ever worked on. I was at one of Australia's 'big four' banks. My $100m project was charged with replacing a tiny part of their mortgage system: the onboarding of a new customer. That was it: just getting a new customer in to the existing legacy system. Oracle were the prime. They were a disgrace. Accenture had their grubby little fingers in the pie and were theoretically, laughably, going to run the thing. They used to charge us $2m to copy and paste documents. The thieves. It was an utter shambles. The 'plan on a page' was diamond shapes on a PowerPoint slide. There was no link to any sort of reality. I lasted 9 months before the blessed gods let me go. Shortly thereafter the whole thing was cancelled.
- skissane 2y ago
  > Oracle were the prime. They were a disgrace I think I may have actually been working on the project you are talking about from the Oracle side. I think many of us tried our very best as individuals. I was never on it full-time, I worked for Oracle engineering but they'd sometimes send us on-site at big customers to fix problems when they blew up. It can be a lot easier to debug a customer's problem when you have the source code right in front of you.
nxobject 2y ago
Christ, why would you go from (relatively) commodity PDP-11 hardware to a more restrictive IBM platform? If you want reliability, any industrial/rugged x86 at that time would have been cheaper and easier to maintain in-house.
- madaxe_again 2y ago
  Couldn’t tell you, but probably some variant of “that’s what the CTO’s last gig used”
tonyedgecombe 2y ago
All the UK high street banks I worked with were running on IBM mainframes (or UNIX in one case) rather than AS400. The only bank I have come across running on an AS400 was a small one in Luxembourg that serviced the mafia.
- nxobject 2y ago
  Why keep the mafia computing at the bank when your crime cartel could have the AS/400 in org? Apparently the Cali cartel had sophisticated “business analytics and intelligence” back in the day. https://www.vice.com/en/article/the-cartel-supercomputer-of-1994/ https://www.vice.com/en/article/the-cartel-supercomputer-of-...

And so do several U.K. high street banks, written in COBOL for the PDP-11, run via an emulation layer of an AS/400, last I stuck my head into that particular hell, and I doubt much has changed.

lbourdages 2y ago

At least those who started on a System 360 can run some applications essentially unmodified on modern hardware... The bus factor on that PDP-11 software must be uncomfortably low.

mastazi 2y ago

> last I stuck my head into that particular hell I don't think it's hell if you like retrocomputing. Personally I find it fascinating. In the past I sometimes had to work on legacy systems and I liked playing the archeologist role. Maybe you are not referring to the platform, but rather to code quality. But I have found some a lot of jumbled messy React code in early stage startups, and some decent code in legacy systems I have worked on, so I guess code quality is not always directly related to age of the system...

madaxe_again 2y ago
I like retro computing - and this ain’t it. This is consultants gouging their clients, and a cultish “we don’t touch that” inherited through generations of management. To be clear, parts of it are in COBOL. Other bits are in RPG, others yet in PL/1, and then a generous application of java, c++, windows shell scripts, unix shell scripts, and it’s all held together with TSVs. It’s more like hoarding than anything else - “don’t touch that, it might be useful, I don’t know, just leave it as it is, we’ll get eleven new servers for whatever it is that it does” In the end we gave them a pile of python that ingested malformatted EDIs that another system made and spat out TSVs so that same system could then not trip over its own shoelaces.
- mastazi 2y ago
  Ah, makes sense, yeah that's not what I had pictured, and it seems like it's not fun at all!

jen729w 2y ago

I got an insight in to why this is the case in 2012, when I had the misfortune to be part of the worst project I've ever worked on. I was at one of Australia's 'big four' banks. My $100m project was charged with replacing a tiny part of their mortgage system: the onboarding of a new customer. That was it: just getting a new customer in to the existing legacy system. Oracle were the prime. They were a disgrace. Accenture had their grubby little fingers in the pie and were theoretically, laughably, going to run the thing. They used to charge us $2m to copy and paste documents. The thieves. It was an utter shambles. The 'plan on a page' was diamond shapes on a PowerPoint slide. There was no link to any sort of reality. I lasted 9 months before the blessed gods let me go. Shortly thereafter the whole thing was cancelled.

skissane 2y ago
> Oracle were the prime. They were a disgrace I think I may have actually been working on the project you are talking about from the Oracle side. I think many of us tried our very best as individuals. I was never on it full-time, I worked for Oracle engineering but they'd sometimes send us on-site at big customers to fix problems when they blew up. It can be a lot easier to debug a customer's problem when you have the source code right in front of you.

nxobject 2y ago

Christ, why would you go from (relatively) commodity PDP-11 hardware to a more restrictive IBM platform? If you want reliability, any industrial/rugged x86 at that time would have been cheaper and easier to maintain in-house.

madaxe_again 2y ago
Couldn’t tell you, but probably some variant of “that’s what the CTO’s last gig used”

tonyedgecombe 2y ago

All the UK high street banks I worked with were running on IBM mainframes (or UNIX in one case) rather than AS400. The only bank I have come across running on an AS400 was a small one in Luxembourg that serviced the mafia.

nxobject 2y ago
Why keep the mafia computing at the bank when your crime cartel could have the AS/400 in org? Apparently the Cali cartel had sophisticated “business analytics and intelligence” back in the day. https://www.vice.com/en/article/the-cartel-supercomputer-of-1994/ https://www.vice.com/en/article/the-cartel-supercomputer-of-...