That's the question today when, courtesy of Sparrow Chat, I read a GAO report on the federal government's legacy systems. The fed spends more
than $80 billion on IT annually. 75% of this went to operating and maintaining legacy systems in 2015; 25% to developing new systems or modernizing the legacy systems. In dollars, this number for maintenance has increased by $7.3 billion since 2010.
Some of these legacy systems are over 50 years old. One would think that the government has gotten a good return on its initial investment in those systems. But, like everything in life, systems do become obsolete. Heck, these systems are using devices and languages that I used in the 1960, such as 8-inch floppy disks in a legacy system that coordinates the operational functions of
the nation’s nuclear forces. That's right, nuclear forces. Some are still using Assembler, which I loved, and Cobol, which took over from Assembler in the 1970s.
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