Page 38 - FCW, June 30, 2016

Individual and Business Master Files
The IRS’ authoritative sources for tax data are programmed in assembly language code that dates from the 1950s.
BackStory Legacy
tech in perspective
A Government Accountability Office report released in May detailed just how much the federal government still relies on legacy IT. But how old is old, really?
1960
1961
1962
1963
1964
Strategic Automated Command
and Control System
The Defense Department uses 8-inch floppy disks and an IBM Series/1 computer to coordinate U.S. nuclear forces.
The Beatles play on “The Ed Sullivan Show”
President
Barack
Obama 1965 born
1966 1967 1968 1969 1970 1971 1972 1973 1974 1975 1976 1977 1978 1979 1980 1981 1982 1983 1984 1985 1986 1987 1988 1989 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001
Benefits Delivery Network
The Department of Veterans Affairs’ 51-year-old system for tracking claims runs on Cobol mainframe applications.
Here are reference points for some of the more notable systems.
Photo credits top to bottom: barack-obama- photos.com, wikipedia.org, iconicphotos.files. wordpress.com, gamester81.com, wikimedia. org, mac-history.net, wikipedia.org, mikerich- ardson.name, nasa.gov, wikimedia.org
TCP/IP introduced as the standard networking protocol on ARPAnet
Fall of the Berlin Wall
NASA’s Pathfinder lands on Mars
Woodstock
Apple Macintosh debuts
AOL launches
Sentry
The Federal Bureau of Prisons’ main IT system is rooted in Cobol but was updated to Java in 2012.
Atari 2600 released
National Weather Service Telecommunication Gateway
The Commerce Department’s hub for weather data was partially upgraded in 2007 but still lacks full backup capability for 26 percent of its functions.
Diversity Visa Information System
This State Department system for tracking and validating some 55,000 visa applications annually is no longer supported by the vendor.
Federal budget standoff and government shutdown
Sept. 11 terrorist attacks
Resource Ordering and Status System
The U.S. Forest Service’s system for mobilizing and deploying resources to fight wildfires supports more than 600 federal, local and state agencies but “is on the verge of technical obsolescence.”