For those of you who don't remember, this is what an 8-inch floppy disk looks like. (credit: Government Accountability Office)
Some of the most critical business systems run by US government agencies are older than many of the IT people who support them, written in mainframe assembler code or COBOL. That might not shock or surprise anyone who works in mainframe-centric industries like insurance and finance, where the time-tested reliability of some systems has granted them lives that reach back to the Johnson administration. But a new GAO report has called out some of these systems as being so archaic that they're consuming increasingly larger portions of agencies' IT budgets just for operation and maintenance. As the breach at the Office of Personnel Management demonstrated, old systems are also a security risk—particularly when they've been "updated" with now-unsupported versions of Windows Server and Internet and database components that were end-of-life'd by their creators years ago.
To drive those points home, the report—written by David A. Powner, GAO's Director for Information Technology Management Issues—called out specific legacy systems from multiple agencies that are particularly obsolete, reliant on older programming languages and older computing technology that are no longer supported. To help members of Congress too young to remember them, the report also included an infographic (as show above) to explain what an 8-inch floppy disk was.
Of the top ten oldest systems cited by GAO, six are over 50 years old—and five of the ten oldest systems, all dating from before the 1980s, are not slated to be replaced anytime soon. And it should come as no surprise that the two oldest systems in government are at the Internal Revenue Service, and both will remain in place for some time.
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