I think the more interesting thing about these ancient programs is the question of why projects to modernise them fail over and over again. Of course we can already guess many of the answers without even reading any post-mortems, but obviously these organisations were able to execute complex IT projects once upon a time and over the years lost that ability, leaving them stranded with ancient systems.<p>In the case of MOCAS I'm going to assume it's all of the standard reasons: weak management, absence of competition, over-reliance on the same small pool of defence contractors that know how to navigate byzantine federal procurement rules, etc.
Because of its longevity, replacing the program will essentially mean replicating all the logic so that its input and output is perfectly duplicated - including any bugs or quirks it has. Any differences, I'm sure, will end up causing a domino effect of failures and inaccuracies in all the <i>other</i> antiquated systems this program talks to. So then the question becomes, "why bother?" and 58 years later it still chugs along. I know of code I personally wrote over a decade ago still being used in production happily every day, so I'm sure this is bound to be a much more common experience in the years to come.
For me, I still occasionally get a server monitoring email from a cron job running a Perl program that first mailed me in April '97. I've got no idea who's keeping that running... The "startup" I wrote that for (and later went to work for) has been dead a decade now.<p>(Scary though: this might mean _someone_ is still running a Redhat 5 or 6 linux machine or VM - that's a late'90's vintage Redhat, not Redhat Enterprise Linux. It's _possible_ I updated that Perl script when we moved to CentOS in the early 2000's, but surely if anyne's been updating it since then - they'd surely have taken my personal email address out of it???)
Slightly off-topic, but meta user interface relevant:<p>IMHO Google has been so successful because of their user interface and not because of its superior algorithm. In essence it is a REPL where the E part is slightly non-trivial.<p>But I agree it is the best user interface. Files and processes are a great thing, but the shell built on-top of it glues everything together and for me is the most successful interface. However it would be nice to switch interpreters <i>online</i>, i.e. switch between e.g. Bash or Python and "human language" (like Google Search). Interestingly DuckDuckGo provides something similar via its '!' syntax.
I read a book by Vernor Vinge where the main character did some software archeology as part of his hobby and technological interests. He discovered that the program used to keep time was viciously ancient, and after looking into "epoch" figured that the old-calendar year "1970" must have been decided upon because "that was when humanity first landed on the moon".
> It’s widely accepted that the first computer program was written by Ada King, Countess of Lovelace, in 1842<p>Hmm. Hasn't this been widely disputed and disproven? I wonder why it keeps being circulated, and with such a bold tone.
Emacs and vi date back to at least 1976:
<a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/bitwise/2014/05/oldest_software_rivalry_emacs_and_vi_two_text_editors_used_by_programmers.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/bitwise/2014/05/old...</a>
My first real job out of college, classic DoD contractor gig, I walked in and was shown the spiffy VAX I was going to be using. I didn't know which was older, the computer or me. There's one sitting in the Computer History MUseum in Mountain View. Wirewrap, 4mb of RAM maximum and each 1mb was a square foot of circuit-board you'd have to slide in and lock into place with thumb-tabs. I felt my own obsolescent like an angry itch every day I showed up for work and turned it on.<p>The way I understand it, the Navy got tired of supporting that. "If you want more of our money, you'll upgrade this crap." So they did, and now it's one server rack with, wouldn't you know, such modern things like USB ports and 21st century OSs and ethernet capability. But that's crazy talk.
Here's a great article with many more examples:<p><a href="http://www.pcworld.com/article/249951/computers/if-it-aint-broke-dont-fix-it-ancient-computers-in-use-today.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.pcworld.com/article/249951/computers/if-it-aint-b...</a><p>My favorite is the 90 yr old Texas company that uses an IBM 402 from 1948. The computer uses plugboards - breadboard-like cards that are programmed by plugging wires like a patch panel. As of the date of the article (2012) they still used the plugboards, as well as a more modern card reader/puncher.<p>Edit: I just realized my example is also mentioned in the OP article, though there is more detail (and photos) in the PCWorld article I linked.
what about these ?
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barrel_organ" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barrel_organ</a>
"You can still find antique green-screen systems if you look hard—in some cases, a pleasant Web interface just disguises the old guts." - There is so much wrong with this sentiment! It's just kind of folded in there, the insinuation that "web interfaces are more pleasant" than TUIs. I cannot express how much this kind of writting annoys me. Why can't they tell the story without wedging in unbacked opinions. The sentence "You can still find antique green-screen systems if you look hard—in some cases, a Web interface just disguises the old guts." would work just as well.