The IT systems we rely on to process our tax returns, monitor hazardous waste, warn us of impending weather disasters, keep our nuclear arsenal safe are geriatric. Out of date. Just plain old.
How old? Well, to give you a rough idea, many of the applications were written back when Andy Griffith first started taking Opie to the local fishing hole.
Applications used by the IRS to maintain data on business and individual income were written in assembly language 56 years ago. The DOD’s Strategic Automated Command and Control System, which coordinates U.S. nuclear forces, is 53 years old. It runs on 1970s-era IBM computer systems and uses 8-inch floppy disks. Each disk, according to a recent GAO report which analyzed federal IT systems, holds 80 kilobytes of data. (It would take more than 3.2 million of those floppy disks to equal the storage power of a single modern flash drive.)
Several other key applications in the Defense and Veterans Departments are also more than 50 years old and run on COBOL, a 1950s programming language. Applications in the Transportation and Commerce Departments are more than 40 years old. And a Homeland Security Department application that tracks hiring decisions at the agency is 39 years old and uses COBOL on a 2008 IBM z10 mainframe.
The GAO presented this information about the federal government’s aging legacy systems to Congress in May, but so far little has been done to update the applications.
President-elect Donald Trump has announced his intention to rebuild our crumbling infrastructure. One can only hope that he’ll take a look at our federal IT systems, which are certainly just as critical for national security.