I have been a geek as well. I tried many times to get away from it but always ended up back in it. My first Air Force assignment out of college was JSUNT at NAS Pensacola, FL to become a fighter/bomber weapons officer. I found that boring and asked to be reassigned as an engineer. When they saw my background and TS, the threw me into Information Warfare. I've been there, albeit on the defensive side, for two decades now.

It's good to know why we are where we are. I wish the younger folks would take more of an interest in the history. It would help them understand the present state of computing so much easier. So much of the Linux world today draws on things back to Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson banging away on a PDP-7 to develop the first version of Unix in the late 60s. Windows, Mac, and most popular programming languages grew from that root, as well.

I have been around computers from a very early age, but my age is microcomputers. I was only exposed to minis and mainframes much later. We don't even really have minis any longer. I was writing code on C64s and Apple IIs in elementary school.

I'm part of a cybersecurity capture the flag competition here in Little Rock. A few years ago we had one that was solely for high school and college students. I used a 1985 AT&T Unix PC to create a few challenges. That computer was at least 10 years older than every participant. They loved the challenge and getting to be hands on with a piece of history though.

Maj (Join to see) - When I started a 4-year contract at Toyota USA in Torrance CA, I was surprised to find a pile of IBM AS 400's lying around. When I asked about it, I learned they had purchased a warehouse full of Dell servers to replace them. I knew there was going to be trouble. The AS 400 was a workhorse, reliable as any ever built. Dell servers were a mess in those days. The firmware was incompatible with the hardware. Thankfully, that wasn't my problem. I may have warned them gently, but made my exit before I got caught up in that mess.

CPT Jack Durish - That's the other bookend to my time at a large financial technology company. The AS/400s were on their last legs and falling apart. They were being replaced by x86 servers en masse, running Red Hat Linux. Most of those were Dell servers, too. Mainframes had a time and place, but a properly designed, load-balanced modern server infrastructure can be as effective, more efficient, and lower cost these days.

Also, most of the people who worked on those old systems are long-retired. It's hard to find younger folks to step in their place. Even when they do, employers and users of those old systems are finding that it's not necessarily academic knowledge of the component systems that's necessary. Those old COBOL and hierarchical databases are written with such spaghetti code that only those who wrote it knows how it works.

Case in point, my last TDY was the perform a security test on a missile defense/space warning system. The original system (installed in 1976) was being replaced with newer components. The old system was 10,000 sq ft with row after row of custom racks. The new system was a 1U "pizza box" running Sun Solaris. The engineers who designed the new system couldn't find anyone who knew anything about the old system. The ended up designing a virtual state machine by, effectively, testing the output values by iterating through all the input values. They never broke down the logic but just simulated the results.

That's what happens when you rely on a system for too long without making updates or modernizing it. I'm afraid we are already there with many old mainframe systems and will be there with all of them before long. It's going to cost these cheapskate companies more in the long run by ignoring the problem.