Specialist Young has some outdated skills, but that’s okay because the Army gets by on outdated computers!

You see those commercials all the time– “Join the Army; learn valuable skills in today’s world” and they show a room full of people using all these super-advanced computers with crazy stuff like holographic screens and such. DON’T BELIEVE IT!

There might be, maybe, a dozen people total using whiz-bang stuff like that. The rest of us, almost universally, get by on stuff from the mid-2000’s. Surprisingly, a lot of the government (civilian agencies as well as defense) actually get by on really, really old stuff– not just old hardware, which is usually about 10 to 15 years behind currently available civilian computers, but seriously old programs that would surprise people to know about.

Things like Fortran and C++ are still used in some cases, and one civilian agency I know of but won’t go into details about only recently (like in the last 5 years) finally transitioned off of a fully DOS based application.

The reasons for this are many. Some are obvious: upgrades cost money, and spending for anything in the government is sure to provoke an argument abut funding, taxes, oversight, and so on, so it is easier to let a functioning system continue to function with patches and fixes. But other reasons factor in that might be surprising.

Stability is a factor– I’ve heard it argued by some (admittedly older) IT professionals that there are advantages to old systems being more stable because they have the bugs worked out and their failure points are well known and patchable. Security, interestingly enough, is also a factor: few hackers bother to learn how to break into and navigate sites based on crumbly old programs that aren’t in widespread use any more.

I don’t know if these rationales are true or not, or if the arguments are being stretched; I have no experience in IT or general tech support fields. I do occasionally see interesting news reports about old programmer’s from the 70’s and 80’s being re-hired out of retirement to come in and deal with old programs that younger programmers are stumped by, so I guess we can at least rest assured that Randall Young will probably find a way to be gainfully employed as he re-integrates into modern life.