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US air traffic control enters the 21st century, starts to abandon floppy disks (www.theregister.com)
submitted 1 day ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 2 points 16 hours ago (3 children)

Why do the banks use COBOL? Why does NASA use FORTRAN?

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  • [–] 4 points 15 hours ago (1 child)

    Because they didn't upgrade their systems in time while deep knowledge of these systems were intact and would have made upgrading seamlessly much easier. Now they have black boxes that no one truly understands anymore, so they're paralyzed by fear and that's what's keeping them trapped in these old systems.

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  • [–] 1 point 5 hours ago

    No, because when infrastructure is sophisticated, critical, and expensive enough, you don't just go around replacing it.

    I bring up Legacy Code for a reason. as one of the few organizations in the world that can spend so many millions of dollars on code that they can virtually guarantee that it's bug free.

    And as for the cobalt code in the banking industry, the entire world could shut down if things went wrong by replacing it.

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