Thursday, May 26, 2016

Mainframe with floppy governing US nuclear – New Technology

A 53-year-old IBM Series 1 mainframe using floppy disks coordinates the US nuclear use, notes alarmed US General Accounting.

U.S. Government Accountability Office, the GAO, the equivalent of our National Audit has investigated everything was more money spent on maintenance of IT systems in the US administration – and has come to the frightening results.

The maintenance and operation of the old system has become increasingly expensive and a drain on the resources to invest in modern iT systems.

GAO found almost unimaginably old iT systems, many of them over 50 years old. In some of them are still used 8-inch floppy disks for data storage, such as the mainframe IBM Series 1 that the Defense Department uses to coordinate the country’s nuclear activities, as intercontinental missiles, nuclear-armed bombers and refueling planes.

Here’s authority at least plan to update the data storage technology to the end of 2017.

Tax Agency uses computer systems that are older than 56 years. These IBM machines still written code in assembly language. The tax authorities have no plans to update the system.

Other authorities are running about 50 years old machines and programming in Cobol. The Department of Justice runs a 35-year old system using Cobol, but also Java. This provides for an update to be completed in September this year.

GAOs report briefly here.

LikeTweet

No comments:

Post a Comment