Most federal systems that are anywhere over ten years old (and that's most of them) are complete mysteries to the people who both use and maintain them.<p>A long time ago, I was responsible for such a system. I didn't ask for the job; I simply was the smartest person in the room for too long.<p>I vividly remember one day we had a problem with folks in a remote location entering things and those things getting mangled and/or lost on the way to the system-of-record.<p>For one system, with maybe five thousand users and perhaps a few gigabytes of traffic a month, I was on a call with 30 people spanning most of the Earth. I learned that there were at least a dozen separate systems at that location between the person entering the data and the data being sent to HQ. Each system was old. Each system had a separate vendor which claimed to be the only vendor to understand that system (Sometimes this was true. Many times they were just bluffing.)<p>And -- and this was the kicker -- for each of our dozens of locations, each location manager, because of their friendship with politicians, made their own decisions about how machines were configured and which programs were installed. They were complaining to us because things were bad, but they did not feel like they answered to us.<p>I was responsible for fixing it.<p>At the end of that call, I was reminded of Arthur C. Clarke's quip: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.<p>But I doubt I thought of it in the way he meant it.