Hacker News Reader

Comment by trimbo | Hacker News Reader

Next we'll get to hear that modernizing old software systems is too hard, so they're still running COBOL on a mainframe out of a single DC that had a fiber cut or something.

View on HN

If anything, it's probably a newer part of the system that failed. The old stuff tends to stay around precisely because it's so reliable.

Also because anything new needs to go through a byzantine FAA approval process. That puts a strong bias towards keeping the old (and approved) systems online.

There’s a lot of that stuff out there still. I was speaking to a former colleague a couple of years back and he discovered a NT4 box with a Hayes modem dangling off it doing mission critical EDI stuff in VB4 while doing a site migration. Not come across anything that old yet. Last one was a single irreplaceable VAX doing DHCP for about 200 users about ten years after it should have been in a skip.

I had a consultant buddy ask me about FoxPro last year because he knew I had done some work with it at one point. Apparently all of payroll at some largeish company you've maybe heard of (~15k employees) was done using an ancient FoxPro Windows 3.11 version (2.6? 2.7? memory's rusty) running via compatibility on Windows 7 and they were just getting around to trying to replace it.

In a way people probably think things like that are insane but if you step back and look at it, if it was getting the job done all these years it was decent engineering.

You take your eye off the ball for 20 or 30 years and look what happens (throws hands in air)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com