Comment by rmxt | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rmxt | Hacker News Reader

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This legacy system issue doesn't just happen to remote/low budget operations either. While they've now moved to emulating the system on what are presumably VMs, Columbia University uses what amounts to a 40 year old system to post final grades to the student administration portal. Official transcript grades are updated once daily, at some time in the wee hours of the morning. From a Columbia CS professor:

"Columbia processes grades by using a system that was first released in 1972. In order to have kept it running for more than 40 years, it has consistently run special-purpose emulators that make its otherwise state-of-the-art systems think that they are stuck in the 70s and using an operating system called “CP/CMS”:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VM_(operating_system)

The grading system is written in a programming language called “Focus,” which in 1975 was one of the very first database languages developed and released:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FOCUS

But because of this, grades are processed only once per day, in a batch job that runs at about midnight every night. I am not making this up.

The university, recognizing that it is time for it to upgrade, does have plans for replacing the grading system. The upgrade is scheduled for the year 2020. I am not making this up either."

http://bwog.com/2014/01/06/why-your-grades-take-so-long-to-s...

I imagine these schools will eventually move to something similar: an emulated system with specialized hardware to interface with the mechanical equipment.

Many universities have systems like that. Banks too. Probably true of many early adopters: they built systems that worked and didn't rewrite them simply for the sake of having something new.

At my first job, we built I/O cards that did stuff like the Amiga in the article does. The cards used adapters so they could run on anything from TRS80's to PC's because at the time the system was conceived, the IBM PC hadn't emerged as the dominant desktop yet.

The company is long out of business, but every so often someone finds some of their products at a garage sale or industrial auction or it comes in a box of other things on eBay. When they search for manuals on the product they often find me because by coincidence someone asked about those products on a forum I frequent and that conversation tends to come up in the first page on google.

It's amazing how many really old systems are still running after decades without change and no one gives it a thought until something breaks. I've often wished I had a list of their old customers so I could contact them and offer my services to upgrade old controls.

[sigh] another business opportunity missed.

Make a webpage with all the info you have on the subject, state what you just stated. Done. Free business.

Yes and please do blog about it regularly if you feel like it - this whole thread on legacy systems is the most interesting read on HN for a long time IMHO.

[smacks self on head] Thank you. For some inexplicable reason the most obvious solution honestly never occurred to me!

Most of my credit cards will not update the balance immediately after I make a payment. It takes a day (sometimes more, depending on timing). Clearly batch processes are involved.

There's nothing wrong with batch processes. They are often easier to reason about than having a system where everything can change in real time.

Sometimes you want real time. Sometimes (many times) a daily batch is just fine.

Credit card processing does seem to be moving towards real-time. Lately I've found more and more merchants where I get a notification on my phone instantly after my Amex is swiped.

Also gives you a chance to change your mind, say to cancel a pending bank transaction in the evening.

You can have delays for that purpose in real-time systems too. And they'd actually be consistent, instead of having variable lengths to cancel the transaction.

When I interned at IBM from 2003-2006, we submitted our timecards using a terminal application accessed over telnet. I don't know exactly what system it was, but the key commands certainly evoked thoughts of early mainframes.

It's not for the sake of having something new. New technologies do often provide obvious benefits. It's the cost of a new version (both in software development and reorganization of processes) that may be too high to justify these benefits.

Probably works a lot better than the crappy peoplesoft system my college bought into...

You have that too. Are you from UCT?

That Peoplesoft system dominates a lot of the schools in the US. It spread like the plague on promises of being tailored to every school's business logic. Unfortunately it did so via vomit-inducing over-abstraction to the point where interfacing with it just to lookup a student record takes hundreds of lines of XML/SOAP wrangling.

> grades are processed only once per day

Playing devil's advocate here...

Do grades change during the day?

Grades on the Columbia equivalent of the Moodle/Blackboard student portal can and do update instantly as soon as teachers hit submit. This is a recently updated, fairly modern system. However, these are not necessarily the official grades that go on your transcript. In my experience, teachers often never post the (possibly curved) final letter grade on this system. I assume that transcript grade system is a separate portal that teachers have to input the final letter grades into. This system, from the POV of the student, only updates once per day. Teachers put their grades in at 5pm? You get your "grade has been posted email" at like 2 am, and practically speaking get your grade whenever you wake up.

Is that really that big of a deal, though? There would be effectively zero benefit to giving the students their new grades on demand instead of after a batch process. It's not a reason to upgrade the system, it just shows that the system was made when batch jobs were considered acceptable.

I do not miss those days of waking up early in the morning after finals to find those emails. I would nervously read them in hopes of not being disappointed by my grade

My memory of University is that professors are the bottleneck to updating your grades, not the nightly batching system.

Different teachers putting their grades in at different times of the day? Sure.

Why should the computer have to deal with what is obviously a poor policy decision on the part of the teachers and administrators?

Enter the grades when you're working - i.e. during your work day.

Oh .. I know, teachers work way more than they are given credit, and don't make nearly enough for the work they do, given that they're up until 4am doing some paperwork or other in order that a few hundred students get their results .. just playing devils advocate here. This is a 40-year old system, still working. If it ain't broke, why fix it?

Seriously though, my personal nerd-ego says that anyone who can keep a system running in emulation over 4 decades deserves a special kind of award for the high status of their accomplishment. This is something few of us are capable of doing these days, alas ..

It doesn't really have anything to do with policy or working odd hours. Unless everyone presses enter at the same time, grades will be input at different times. (I'd love to see administrators trying to corral senior faculty into doing that, though.)

As to whether a system should process grades more than once a day, that's obviously a judgement call that Columbia has made. And as someone who worked in the administration of similar university, a small part of me is cheering on whoever at Columbia has held fast against the demand for up-to-the-minute GPAs.

Actually, so you're saying you think it is all the result of smart policy, and I agree with you now. I see that up-to-the-minute GPA's are a real burden. Funny though, that they all have to hit enter at the same time, didn't realize it was that brilliant. ;)

Grades would change any time an instructor chooses to input new grades. Some exam is graded, homework is turned in.

The vast majority of them wait til the last minute to do it, right at the end of term.

IBM mainframes incorporate VM technology in both senses of the word: the "abstract ISA" sense and the "simulated hardware" sense. They knew they were building systems that may have to be online for decades; and the exact same object code that ran on the original System/360 runs bit-identical on a brand new POWER-based mainframe (though obviously faster).

I know what you mean comparing it to Columbia University, but Grand Rapids isn't exactly a remote location. It's the second largest city in Michigan. We're not talking about northern Alaska.

It's not remote, but the school district hasn't exactly been flush with cash over the past few decades. If this occurred in East Grand Rapids, Forest Hills, etc., I would be more surprised.

Hi Chris :)

Even modern software would work like this. Many universities use a product called Appworx that schedules jobs... and your grades are only going to be upgraded once per day.

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