26 May
2016
26 May
'16
3:24 p.m.
On Thu, May 26, 2016 at 2:53 PM, Noel Chiappa <jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu>
wrote:
Back to the original story: there's another angle on this with government
work. I once tried to acquire a vintage system through an auction house.
We (LCM) won the auction, but the next day the auction house refunded our
money - apparently the machine was pushed into the wrong room and was not
to be auctioned off.
I begged for it anyway, and was told that because it was part of an active
program (testing for some fighter jet), it was still in use. When I
suggested modernizing, I was told that changing the hardware would require
*re-certifying the entire workflow*. In other words, it was far more
economical to maintain a 70's era computer than spec, design, acquire/build
and certify a new system.
I suspect that "journalism" like this is prompted by (and likely paid for)
by companies who profit from getting people on the endless-upgrade
merry-go-round. But then I'm cantankerous that way. Cheers -- Ian
--
Ian S. King, MSIS, MSCS, Ph.D. Candidate
The Information School <http://ischool.uw.edu>
Dissertation: "Why the Conversation Mattered: Constructing a Sociotechnical
Narrative Through a Design Lens
Archivist, Voices From the Rwanda Tribunal <http://tribunalvoices.org>
Value Sensitive Design Research Lab <http://vsdesign.org>
University of Washington
There is an old Vulcan saying: "Only Nixon could go to China."
From: Ethan
O'Toole
Might not be a bad idea to make a wiki page
somewhere and ... source
generic replacements. This way vendor/part# of modern replacements
can
be had for old belt drive floppys and computer
tape drives?
I think the audio cassette deck enthusiasts do something like this
Excellent idea. The data can be put on the Computer History wiki; I've been
putting a lot of PDP-11 info up there. Let me know if you have data to
post,
and can't get access.
From: Paul Koning
It clearly is not all that accurate. In a
discussion of "old"
systems,
it mentions a system with "reported age 52
years" but it "runs on
windows server 2008 and is programmed in Java". ... A number of other
examples are similar. For example, a "56 year old" IRS system that
actually runs on an IBM z series machine from 2010.
Perhaps this is just sloppy writing, and they really 'the application is 52
years old, but it has been translated into Java'? And the latter one could
easily be System/360 code from 56 years ago, running on a z series.
Noel