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I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Critical government services running COBOL. Programs stored in magnetic tapes, entire offices dependant on one guy who’s retiring. All that code will be lost in time, like tears in rain
There is genuine money to be made in learning the “dead languages” of the IT world. If you’re the only person within 500 Miles that knows how to maintain COBOL you can basically name your price when it comes to salary.
I just wish I had the slightest interest in programing
I’ve seriously looked into picking one of these dead languages up and honestly, it’s not worth it.
Biggest issue is, you have to be experienced to some degree before you get the name your price levels. So you’ll have to take regular ol average programmer pay (at best) for a language that’s a nightmare in 2023. Your sanity is at heavy risk.
I’d honestly rather bash my head with assembly, it’s still very much in use these days in a modern way. Most programs still get compiled into it anyway (Albeit to a far more complicated instruction set than in the past) and can still land some well paid positions for not a whole lot of experience (relatively)
Yeah man I’ll take plain old php and java any time of day, I can still get enough money from it to pay my lifestyle. And at 5pm I can close my laptop and play vidya with no worries.
I’ve been meaning to learn Fortran in part because because of the whole “big bucks for being willing to maintain old software” thing, but mostly because I’d like to work on the sorts of scientific computing software that was (and still often is) written in Fortran.
Fortran syntax is a warm summer rain tickling your face compared to c++ for high performance computing which is like slap in the face for non it peeps
Sounds like you got a golden shower from Fortran.
Enjoy.
Its not peepee until you know its pee.
Been working in COBOL for a decade and this is all true.
I’m lucky. I personally enjoy it. But i can totally see how it’s an absolute nightmare for most people.
This is one of those fantasies people have. You might as well hope to win the lottery.
Imagine being the only person who can play a extremely custom instrument. Unless someone absolutely needs you, you’ll be sitting and hoping to get a job. Worse, a company is more likely to hire some people to rebuild it rather than hope to find this unicorn who can do this.
Source: Been in the industry for 15yrs. I’m one of those guys you hire to migrate old software to a web app. And frequently, company will pay to modernize rather than support outdated tech every time.
Been in the industry for 10 years and i deeply disagree with you. I work in COBOL.
Not that migrations don’t happen, but in my experience, many, many companies kick that can down the road each year, because migrating huge and critical services is extremely costly, time-consuming and risky. In the short term, just paying people to maintain the dinosaurs is waaaay cheaper.
Also, it’s extremely easy to get a job in it ( my company now hires people with no IT background and tries to teach them cobol from scratch ), because even though it’s a niche, the demand for it still outweighs the supply of people willing to learn it.
Will it die out eventually? Maybe. I’ve been hearing about its death for a decade, so i’ve become skeptical about it in the short-term.
Edit : would also like to point out that it is indeed a fantasy that it pays truckloads of money. Does it happen? Sometimes, but you need to be really good and experienced at it.
I’ll learn cobol. What company? I do have an it background as a bonus though.
Good luck to you!
I’d rather not dox myself, but i can tell you i’m in eastern europe working for a western european bank. COBOL is still heavily used in the banking and insurance sectors, by companies that started using it 50 years ago.
If you do manage to learn the ropes, the salary does tend to be above average for a mid-level programmer.
COBOL case is bit different. You can’t just modernize millions of lines of code that is functionally unique without service disruption - and services that uses COBOL that large often tends to be very sensitive.
The fact that COBOL as a language is both atrocity to either use or read didn’t help that either.
How about a little casual graming on the side?
There is some logic to running older stuff, a lot of it is a closed system and it’s harder for threats to target it. Banks are a big one that still run a ton of our financial infrastructure on COBOL.
Hospitals also run on a ton of abandon ware, same with machine shops. Ultrasound machines that are still running 95 because for the hospital to upgrade to windows 7 or 10 is millions for a few machines. So you just airgap the systems for security.
The good part about it is being more sustainable by using the same PCs for three decades.
Imagine banks, hospitals and so on regularly replacing their machines. That would be an ungodly amount of electronics
Unfortunately, they still have parts that fail, the good news is most of its being replaced with new old stock, so not technically new stuff. I know a good number of companies that have stock piles of basically museum level hardware, to replace failing parts.
Credit to them for not wanting to move to 98 either.
Just have a look at the American pension system. They collect all their documents on paper in an old salt mine. Truckloads of documents per month.
Magnetic tapes aren’t that surprising, it’s just even more cost effective storage than HDD.
I work for a company who’s main source of income is a suite of accounting, stock and job management applications, all of which are written in FoxPro. The community add-ons and support is incredible but there hasn’t been any official support since like 2009.
Microsoft bought the license for FoxPro, supported it for a few years then killed it off when VB came out. I wonder why xD
The crazy part is some of our clients are turning over 100s of millions in profit a year, using this crappy, mess of a system written in a dead language, by one dude 😂
This post is so true. I work in local government in a state that has TONS of money, yet our systems to control the information for agents to determine if you keep your kids or not is still based on MS-DOS. it’s insane to see in 2023
Using something like DOS is neither preferred nor more safe. Last time MS DOS received a security patch was 23 years ago. It’s open to pretty much any security vulnerability you can think of. In case you depend on a DOS app it’s preferable to run it on a modern OS that is DOS compatible, windows 10 32bit for example (I believe Win11 still has support). Or even better sandboxed in an emulator like DOSBox on a more secure OS.
It’s a good read, read it.
+1, do not regret
Highly agree with the first point, companies should not be able to hold exclusive rights to any product they no longer provide support for.
Abandonware and unsold products are one of the few cases in which I consider piracy ethical
I agree, although the number of pointless updates that would be pushed so that companies can keep the rights to their software makes me cringe
Capitalism will always capitalism. “Oh, we have to provide a healthy option? Okay, it’ll be the expensive option.” “Oh, we have to support software? Okay, subscription models only” “Oh, we have to pay our workers minimum wage? Okay, we’ll pay them not a penny more and raise our prices”
It’s an endless fight… Yet, we can’t stop fighting it, because attrition of our values and apathy in our actions are weapons the system uses against us.
Even books have the same. IIRC the ‘corrected’ version of Bilbo receiving the ring came into the Hobbit because the publisher wanted Tolkien to make a revised version to keep the copyright going.
(I presume the corrected version of that chapter was just taking advantage of the opportunity, but still…)
Many years ago, I worked for a software company that included code escrow for our customers. If something happened to is, they could unlock the code and support it themselves.
It can be done, but probably only is in industries with strong companies for customers
There is also open source software.
It gets worse than this.
Not only does most scientific instrument software become abandonware, but there are companies that sell instruments that use the exact same components as they did 20 years ago. The only difference is now they swapped the stainless steel parts for plastic and charge luxury car prices for what will be a piece of garbage in 3 years. These pieces have nothing to do with chemical compatibility and everything to do with increasing the frequency of maintenance that the older models never needed.
I don’t know how we can’t legislate this into existence eventually if nothing else just based on climate change and the amount of working material we just… throw away. Especially as more and more things integrate software, I imagine that it’s going to feel absolutely insane to people in a few decades (after the water wars and the great migrations) that they had technology like the microscope in the post but the company decided no more software updates so now it’s just garbage.
I love this post. How can you have the rights to something you don’t support?
Intellectual property rights. They even wanted to extend it recently so they can milk old stuff.
Perhaps it could be like copyrights and patents? If you don’t defend them, you lose them, and in some cases they expire after a set amount of time and then they can be used by others
Stallman was right.
IP shouldn’t exist in general.
But then how would TCP and UDP work?
Time to load up NetBIOS and… Stuff.
Fair, lol
Property other than what you personally use to live shouldn’t exist, but if we’re moving away from capitalism, IP is not first on the list of things to abandon
Yes.
Also, I could see some forms of IP being higher on the list than others. A market socialist setup, where every company is a worker owned co-op, would still have a lot of use for Trademarks. It could be a far less abusive system than the one we have now, but we’d still want it to exist.
Market socialism itself is likely to only be a transitory step, though.
This happens in the world of CNC machines too. I used to run a two million dollar Mazak 300 Fabrigear that was made in 2008. When I started the machine up, Windows 98 booted up before starting the FANUC control program that actually ran the machine.
My friend’s dad has a CNC machine that requires floppy disks to load the design patterns. He’s worried that a mechanical failure of the disk drive will eventually be the end of it, rather than the machine itself being obsolete. It’s been going strong for almost 40 years now.
Look for usb floppy emulators, you can have the floppy images in a usb flash drive. No moving parts or need to find expensive floppies.
If this thing relies on floppy, I don’t imagine it would be USB compatible
GoTEK SFR1M44-U100 3.5 Inch 1.44MB USB SSD Floppy Drive Emulator Black https://a.co/d/hJwq736
Almost 40 years, so it’s been running since the 80s? Damn, older than Windows.
It might be possible to buy an old floppy drive off ebay and switch out the broken one of that happens, as long as there are no proprietary connectors and such…
Compaq would like a word.
Ah yes, Compaq, the company that used non standard power supplies but with the standard wire coloring and connectors. I had several customers blow up their motherboards after buying standard replacement power supplies.
It’s amazing even for the cheaper CnC machines in other industries running on Dos or Win95, 98, XP. I use to have to maintain the hardware of these older PCs as the initial outlay to replace the machines was fairly high compared to stress and much lower cost of finding old hardware.
In the end with the modem equivalent CnC machines on the lower end we would only see minimal upgrades to the functions of the machines, versus the updates to the software. Let’s me honest that would become obsolete yet again within a few years.
It’s the circle of life?
As long as it’s not connected to a network and is actually maintained, there’s nothing specifically wrong with Windows 98. Also just make sure the USB ports are shut.
COBOL is still used heavily in banking, it would be the ultimate abandonware if it wasn’t still getting supported.
I work in an astrophysics department and this is exactly why we almost exclusively use open source software
Based
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