6 Important Things That Are Done With Insanely Outdated Tech

The space shuttle has since been put out of its misery, but other NASA projects are still running on pure nerd nostalgia. The Hubble Space Telescope's backup systems depend on a chip from 1989, the International Space Station's most important computer runs on a processor from the year The Breakfast Club came out, and even the Mars Curiosity rover was launched into space in 2011 with a version of a chip from 1997. Hopefully NASA gets a good deal on the interplanetary shipping when they inevitably have to order replacement parts for that one.

And it's not like it's one of those "still does the job just fine" situations. Lieberman, who once depended on the antiquated machines for his own safety, says the Secret Service's IBM mainframe is so problem-prone that it's fully operational only 60 percent of the time. Since the government standard is around 98 percent, this means that the computers meant to keep the thickness of the president's skin from being tested in a literal way are probably less reliable than the ones giving out change at the Pentagon's cafeteria.

Arnold Reinhold
The last thing they want is for the blue screen of death to be a reference to their boss.

Luckily, the Secret Service is making a valiant attempt to modernize, starting with the most important area: They've recently solicited proposals to develop software that can detect sarcasm in social media posts. Oh, and they asked that this software work with Internet Explorer 8, because when the president's life is on the line, you accept nothing less.

The VA hospital is where legitimate American heroes receive the maintenance they often need after getting run through the engines of war. That is, if they can get an appointment with a doctor at all. Over the past year there's been a controversy about VA hospitals failing to do the one thing they're here for and letting veterans die without care ... which is slightly less surprising when you find out that this what they're using to schedule appointments:

Microsoft
Medicine, Abort, Fail?

That's MS-DOS, the Batman Begins to Microsoft Windows' The Dark Knight -- a relic from the era before software developers recognized the power of colors. Last summer, the director of the VA hospital in Wichita, Kansas, informed U.S. Sen. Pat Roberts via fax (of course) that the Jurassic-era scheduling system had contributed to the creation of "secret waiting lists." These pen-and-paper lists not only allowed the staff to make vets wait longer than the federally acceptable period of 14 days for an appointment, but if they croaked while waiting, they wouldn't show up in the hospital's official records. Which raises the question: If a vet dies and there's no official record of it, are you bastards still going to Hell?

That's not as bad as a VHS tape -- it's called a Betacam, and it offers much higher quality. But it's still strange that, in this day and age, we have to send physical copies at all. Even though every submitted show eventually gets stored digitally in a Library of Congress data bank, someone still has to convert it from a DVD or videotape first. Not only is this a huge pain in the ass for studios and registrars, but it often means that the copy being preserved for our great-great-grandkids to binge-watch is a lower-quality one. For instance, House Of Cards can be watched online in 4K, but it still goes to the Copyright Office on DVD-R, which means the secretion status of Kevin Spacey's facial pores could be completely lost on future space archaeologists.

The reliance on vintage technology isn't so surprising when you consider that, until September 2015, the Library of Congress' top dog was 87-year-old James H. Billington, who was appointed by Ronald Reagan and is proud of the fact that he doesn't use email. Over the years, Billington consistently ignored calls to hire someone who can actually tell an iPad from a dinner plate, presumably under the impression that this whole "technology" thing will blow over and we'll go back to entertaining each other with shadow puppets in no time.

Paul Morigi/Getty Images Entertainment/Getty Images
They don't even have a mission statement, because his quill ink kept drying out.

And when a payroll error inevitably occurs, correcting the problem becomes a soul-crushing ordeal for the service members that often lasts months. One victim just happened to be retired four-star general Peter Schoomaker, who was called back into active duty as the Army chief of staff in 2003. Schoomaker, whose job it was to sit at a table and advise the president during the second Iraq War, didn't start getting paid for months. To add insult to injury, the system automatically sent a premature consolation letter to Schoomaker's "widow." They didn't even spell his name right.

Mark Wilson/Getty Images News/Getty Images
For a brief moment, Jen P. Schoomaker technically became the nation's first openly lesbian General.

The U.S. government is the nation's largest employer, which means they have a ton of paperwork on everyone who has ever worked for Uncle Sam. Unfortunately, we don't mean "paperwork" as a figure of speech -- there are over 28,000 file cabinets full of paper records that have to be processed by hand. And, in keeping with the retro theme, that processing takes place in the least technological place possible: a big-ass underground cave in Pennsylvania.

Iron Mountain

Pittsburgh Business Times
Presenting the most boring Bat-Cave your tax dollars could pay for.

To house all the paperwork, the Office of Personnel Management leases a former limestone mine in Pennsylvania from a company called Iron Mountain. U.S. government workers filing for retirement are required to print their applications and ship them there -- in 15 percent of cases, an OPM worker embarks on an epic journey to hunt down any matching records in the eight "file caverns." In the other 85 percent, documents are scanned into digital records and can be searched electronically, but current procedure dictates that those files must still be printed out and placed into manila folders, because of stupid cave politics, most likely.

After another few weeks of hassling distant government offices for missing records, still more shipping and more manila happens before pension checks can finally be mailed. The OPM's efficiency problems are so ingrained into federal bureaucracy culture that some workers actually save up to support themselves during the weeks to months when the government is taking its sweet time calculating how much they owe them.

Iron Mountain
They have top men working on it, you have Top Ramen to survive on.

The government has spent millions on failed attempts to update the facility over the last 30 years, most recently on a $106 million electronic records system rolled out in 2008 ... only to be scrapped three months later. To this day, OPM spelunkers still have to process paperwork by hand. On the upside, the cave-dwelling paper jockeys will be some of the few human beings that survive the inevitable nuclear apocalypse. And then they can start repopulating the Earth ...

With bureaucrats.

Jeff is an actor/writer from Los Angeles and had a PC in 1986. He also has a webseries called Youth Pastor Kevin and tweets @jefffeazell.

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