Confessions of an IT Manager_Phil Factor

140 The Ghost in the Machine
I have always felt rather second-rate as an IT pundit as I have yet to
introduce my own TLA (Three-letter Acronym) into the IT industry. I would
therefore like to suggest a new branch of IT: solving IT problems by
Antiquarian Research in Technology, or ART, to aficionados.
Time and again in my working life, I have come across some truly bizarre
applications. At first glance, the existence of such a system can seem
inexplicable. When called upon to upgrade one of them the natural tendency is
to re-write it from first principles. This is time-consuming and often involves
more work than is strictly necessary. On occasions when an application is so
complex that rewriting it from scratch is unfeasible, one may simply throw
one's hands up in defeat and allow the bizarre application to keep trundling on,
often way past its natural expiry date. I offer a third way: progress through
ART.
I was once called in to help with the decommissioning of a large VAX
mainframe. It was getting expensive to run and all but one of the database
applications that it was hosting had been superseded. This last application was,
I was told, doing engineering calculations of such a specialist nature that it was
likely to be understood by only a handful of postgraduate academics with extra
lobes to their brains. I was asked to find a home for this application, either by
re-writing the application or porting it to a different host, so they could then
switch off the VAX. It seemed an impossible task.
In some awe, I visited the computer centre, and was guided round by the
manager who proudly showed me the enormously expensive mainframes, the
Star-Trek network boxes with their twinkling lights, and the fire-prevention
systems that, in a moment, could fill the place with carbon dioxide and
exterminate every life-form within.
The analyst who tended the VAX had never had to maintain the system in
any way, and had never probed the inner workings of the application, but he did
express his puzzlement at the huge amount of disk access that it required. A
quick look at the source code was enough to convince me that no human had
spawned it. It was completely opaque FORTRAN code with numeric labels and
no comments. It looked like the machine-generated output of a 4G Language. I
did the only sensible thing, which was to recoil in horror.
When I had calmed down, I mulled over the problem. This was a complex
and technical application. The 'real' source code for it was missing and the
machine-generated code was un-modifiable. Rewriting it from scratch was not
an option. Further, the FORTRAN code was completely machine-specific, so a
straight port was out-of-the-question too. Refusing to be defeated, I turned to
ART. I felt that if I could find out how on earth the application had wound up
where it was, in the state it was, I would be much closer to a solution.