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One of the strange things that people don’t realize is that a lot of government software is ancient. It exists to service antiquated databases. There are programmers in their sixties and even seventies who make a good living dealing with technology that the average millennial has never even heard of.
While that problem isn’t fully unique to the government. Even the copy of Windows your computer may be running has plenty of ancient code in it to maintain backward compatibility, and some companies have ossified systems, but the situation is particularly absurd in the government. And while DOGE doesn’t get everything right, one area well within Musk’s expertise is technology. Social Security runs on COBOL. And by programming standards, COBOL is ancient. Updating that is necessary not only to cut costs, but to maintain functionality and have proper integration and access. The federal government is like some strange Dickensian library filled with incompatible standards and systems that have to maintained by a specialized techno caste.
And so the media is freaking out, not because it actually cares, but because it’s frantically pushing the REPUBLICANS ARE COMING FOR SOCIAL SECURITY button that is its last best hope.
Government codebases need to be compatible. We need to be able to integrate and maintain the various data sources. And ideally we should be able to do that before the last programmers who can do so die or more likely retire to a nice beach somewhere.
Moving Social Security off COBOL doesn’t threaten social security, it helps protect it.
Daniel:
The dilemma here is that those antiquated systems absolutely need to replaced but at what cost? Given the government’s demonstrated propensity towards over spending and under delivering, upgrading could cost upwards of 20+ billion dollars and still left with a system that is obsolete by current standards.
In my career, I’ve seen this happen several times with NASA of all places. You would think that they would use cutting edge technology but sad to say, they don’t.
Centralization of government power is part of the problem. The other thing that needs to be done is occasionally you need to do a great reset of all the employees in managerial positions. Over time they network with too many business interests and politically driven forces. Maybe government employees should have a limit of how many years they can work in managerial positions before they are prohibited from further employment in management and maybe even prohibited from employment on boards of large corporations.
I started in the Life Insurance industry in 1986 at 25 years old with one of America’s largest and oldest, old line mutual companies.
In my first year, I was invited to a regional Home Office to attend a conference for promising rookies. The promised magic PCs offered to industries like ours was just dawning and so I thought I was going to get a tour de force look at the works behind the curtain of our operations center.
Man, what a let down. As I’ve joked over the last 40 years of my career that from the outside such companies may seem to be on the technological cutting edge of in reality, when the door was opened to the back offices what I saw was a cavernous, Dickensian room dimly lit by oil lamps with row upon row of metal desks manned by solemn clerks in blousy shirts with arm garters and green eye shades furiously stabbing at hand-cranked adding-machines meticulously scribbling the numbers from long tails of receipts into large, cloth bound ledger books kept in wooden file cabinets.
I exaggerate, of course. They had electric lighting. But most days it doesn’t seem like much has changed from my first impressions that day. 🙂
Hey, The government just place an order for 5000 Abacuses,
please, maintain the poetry …
It’s abaci.
What, no slide rules?
Let me tell you something even more interesting: Today’s average personal laptop computer has far more computational power than the all the computers systems used aboard the space shuttle and to monitor its telemetry from the ground.
And yet the average person uses all that computational power to play video games. As a retired engineer, all I can say is, what a waste of time and energy and intellect! All that effort and all people want to do is play video games? (Cue the head slap) Ai yi yi eechi carumba!!
Actually, in the late 1980s, the average desktop PC had more computational power than the shuttles having worked at the then at Patrick for RCA under contract with the USAF to support and run the Eastern Space and Missile range along with Pan Am.
Just fyi
In the early 2000s, I was shocked to find the space shuttle still ran on 386s. I was told it was because of their sturdiness and reliability.
Were they drinking Oliver Twists?
I think NASA saw its best days back when you and Buzz Aldrin were there. Nowadays all it seems to be able to do is Islamic outreach and strand astronauts in orbit for over nine months. It took a South African white guy who just happens to be rich as F to get them down to Earth. I watched the splashdown landing. Good times.
Did you know Buzz Aldrin said a hidden prayer on the moon because some dyke at NASA hated Christianity?
I don’t know how you guys made it past all the bullshit. When I was a kid, it was all smiling astronauts and moon landings and chicks in bikinis.
Trust me when I say that NASA has devolved into a “can’t do” government bureaucracy with a dearth of innovative ideas and no clue on how execute on those ideas beyond creating/tasking a micro-bureaucracy to study the idea.
The talented people go to work in private industry. The least talented people go to work for the government. SpaceX is one example of that.
By the way, I was 12 years old when man landed on the moon. That event changed my destiny in life and inspired me to become an engineer. (I still have the original front page story of the landing from my local newspaper–the LA Times–that I kept all these years later!) I spent the last 30 years of my career in the space industry before retiring.
I can’t match that. I saw the moon landing the day before my fifth birthday. I still remember that. My parents let me and my brother stay up to watch it. It was God like. When you think of it, that trip to the moon was impossible but they did it.
Yes. But You never worked for Elon. Or DOGE. 20 Billion ? Maybe for a Nice Bloated Contract. That allows for Democrat skim. Off the top.
I’m not sure it is even possible to fix the problem, but maybe someone has figured out a way.
I had a good friend (now deceased) who made his living as an expert COBOL programmer. When the wave of cheap immigrant programmers started coming in, his large corporation laid him off, then hired him to teach the new immigrant programmers. That was when I first started feeling guilty about not opposing immigration.
The programming is so hopeless that it can’t accept correct data, so the interviewers have to fudge your data to find something the program will accept. Like when there was talk of 150 years olds in the system, I just rolled my eyes, understanding exactly what was going on.
Back in the 2000 “millennium bug” scare it was thought older systems with old OS’s would crash at 12:01am, Jan. 1, 2000 because they were thought incapable of flipping from 99 to 00 in date fields. Chief among the suspect OS’s was COBOL used for decades on many government systems and large, bureaucratic businesses like insurance companies and such. Social Security was probably the #1 concern at the time and many a news story warned that Grandma was likely to be deprived of her desperately needed monthly checks.
I had an older pal who was a career COBOL programmer rebooted out of semi-retirement and gone free-lance to help well-paying COBOL customers weather the forecasted storm. I remember him scoffing and chuckling that the supposed “millennium bug” was a phony panic stampeding COBOL customers spread by the usual media carnival barkers. He saw the episode as a very lucrative, last-hurrah capping off his career that would require very little real effort on his part.
That was over 25 years ago and still, the US government hasn’t updated some of its most important systems running some of the Left’s cherished, formally untouchable Big Ideas, like Social Security. The ancient and hoary infrastructure is emblematic of the unchanging stasis of the ideas themselves and just one more little proof of how right America was last Nov. 5th.
No it wasn’t. I worked for an insurance company whose policy administration system was a bought package. We wrote six year bond policies among other types of insurance. One of the checks in the system was effective date of the policy had to be greater than expiration date. So a policy that expired in 95 would have its next effective date as 01. 01 not greater than 95. So we had to remediate all the policy systems .
P.S. …
Let us tip the hat to Grace Hopper, without whose genius vision we would never have had a language as ROBUST as COBOL.
It is easy for today’s needs to be dismissive, but COBOL has held up quite well for the work it has been asked to do…..which is part of the problem when you think about it.
COBOL: A programming language so bad that only the government could think of it 🙂
When I worked at HP circa 1978 or so, there was an Uber nerd programmer who helped with the “Rocky Mountain BASIC” language (which was largely cribbed by Microsoft for its version of BASIC) on the Qwert series.
(The War Room scenes for the movie “War Games” (starring Matthew Broderick) were done on Qwerts.)
But I digress …
This programmer was warning way back in ’78 that there was a fortune to be made by COBOL programmers who could come up with dump-and-flag programs for the various systems running COBOL… Wang and Honeywell and IBM and other lesser outfits …which would take everything — instructions, files, subroutines, everything — and go through it line by line, looking for data fields which might be filled with day and date info of any sort (file data or executable code) and simply FLAG IT.
Other Cobol programmers could be brought in to look at all of the flagged memory addresses and slots to determine if they were or were not day and date info, and if they were to widen the field to where it could handle FOUR hexadecimal digits (enough to distinguish between 1900 and 2000) .
The COBOL programmers brought in could make an easy, if boring, six figures or so for the one to two years working the problem.
The ones who wrote the Dump Everything And Flag utilities could make high six figures.
Done With Qwerts …
In my day, I worked as a software engineer, Systems engineer and system integrator.
Government contractors love cost plus projects. Prime example, VA electronic medical records. Still waiting to be able for them to be viewed in EPIC which all civilian hospitals use.
Build a system any fool can use and only a fool will use it.
Cobol, How about PL/I, Fortran 4, Assembler etc. The list is endless.
My classmates razsed me when they heard ALGOL mentioned.
That’s ALGOrithmic Language to get “ALGOL” — Not me.
My favorite start to a Dad Lecture. Yes and no.
Been through a number of system upgrades.
All you need is a few tech guys who are not idiots
… and an AFE to hire them
… and a management that isn’t there to make sure they fail.
I know – it’s a lot for the Feds.
Probably $100 trillion dollars and 100 years is not enough to do the job – for the Feds.
But.
Musk probably has a dozen guys who could fix it in 12 days for pizza and beer.
I won’t hold my breath.
You obviously know nothing about converting MIS systems, and the planning and testing process required to prove that they actually work.
“Government codebases need to be compatible.” ??? They do not need to be compatible, but they do need to work correctly. The current systems, which may indeed be outdated, do work correctly. There is no way that the entire social security data management system can be converted from Cobol in a few months, and “artificial intelligence” won’t speed up the process. The way in which a complex system like this is typically upgraded is to write new sections of the system using newer code forms, slowly and methodically testing the integration with the existing code while (most importantly) identifiying and learning from one’s mistakes, and upgrading the entire system incrementally over a period of years. Anybody who thinks that this can be done in a matter of months has no experience working with these kinds of systems and no understanding of system life-cycle planning and system testing requirements. As a retired software engineer who did develop software in Cobol, and who now receives Social Security, I am terribly freightend by DOGE’s announced intention to upgrade the Social Security data management system “in a few months”.
Just to be nitpicky, the correct way to write the acronym is CoBOL and not COBOL or Cobol,. which stands for Common Business Oriented Language..
I know, that’s such a small thing but now that you know, doesn’t your day seem a bit brighter?
Meow.
The nature of the computers is that they need to be upgraded frequently. Both hardware and software.
The company I work for upgrades all the servers every 3 years to the latest version of the hardware.. The software updates are more frequent almost every other month.
The cost of these upgrades must be calculated into companies spending budget. There is absolutely no way around it.
Leasing is the way to go. Buying a 12,000 dollar server which is good for only 3 years costs more than leasing it for 2,500/year.
The same concept applies to the IT employees. The employees must keep up with the latest technology or be replaced with somebody who can keep up with technology advances.
It’s mind boggling how the US government is failing to apply the necessary updates and upgrades.
The computer industry is the fastest advancing and changing sector.
Just as an example: other fields are the same too, but they advance at a slower pace.
I personally don’t trust a doctor who is not updated with the most recent medical science research.
It’s an adopt and evolve or die when it comes to technology.
Ditto! My son is an IT professional and tells me the same things. Server technology evolves to fast for a medium to large company to even consider buying them when leasing is cheaper. Leasing them allows you to keep pace with the latest state of the art. Leasing is a financial win-win for both parties.
COBOL has evolved. It became an object oriented language.
“Yes, COBOL became object-oriented with the introduction of COBOL 2002, allowing for features like classes and methods. However, it is primarily known for its procedural programming capabilities.”
The problem is not the language. the problem is the programming staff or the lack thereof.
If you want to use another program like SAP, you would need to use middleware.
Oh for the days of magnetic core memory, Hollerith Cards, FORTRAN, and the IBM Selectric typewriters.
How could the government not have seen this coming? New languages were introduced and the schools stopped teaching COBOL. Stop throwing billions away in foreign aid and upgrade old systems before the COBOL lights go out.
EPIC is written in MUMPS, which stands for (“Massachusetts General Hospital Utility Multi-Programming System”. that dates back to the 1960’s, yet EPIC is still used by most health care providers. One reason it has survived is that database access is built into the language, so it was unaffected by the evolution of database technology. Moving apps from one database technology to a different one is painful and expensive. The age of the computer language is not really the issue. C dates back almost as far and it is still at the heart of UNIX, the operating system used on almost anything that doesn’t run Windows, from phones up to server farms. C has evolved and is the ancestor of C++, Java, C# and JavaScript. You can bet that there is still a lot of C in any UNIX based system. The real problem is that COBOL was designed in the era of punched cards It fell out of favor because it was not adaptable to interaction with users through terminals, and later, PCs.. Unlike MUMPS, COBOL couldn’t evolve in that direction.
Since no new systems were being written in COBOL from the early 80s onwards, nobody was learning COBOL. So, young guys who wrote the original COBOL systems stayed on supporting the systems they had written. But now they are going or gone.
COBOL is horribly verbose and COBOL applications can have millions of lines of code developed and patched and modified over decades. Converting such a system to modern technology is not really feasible, s0 nothing happen until something bad happens, like finding out your system is no match for fraudsters. And nowhere is that more obvious than in voter registration systems.
Maybe Musk & Co should be talking to the guys at Omaga4America.
https://fractalcomputing.substack.com/p/elon-cannot-merge-government-databases?publication_id=2720922&post_id=160033880&isFreemail=true&r=b36xf&triedRedirect=true