5

The Secret Service Relies On An '80s Mainframe That Works Only Half The Time

Since it's charged with keeping the president safe, of course the Secret Service would be equipped with all the best super-technology that the USA has to offer the world ... of 1987.

For those living in the present, unfortunately, the Secret Service's rig might seems a little dated. According to Sen. Joe Lieberman, as recently as 2010 the Secret Service still relied on an '80s-era mainframe, much like the one Matthew Broderick hacked into in WarGames. Something like this:

Erik Pitti / Wiki Commons
There are no photos of the Secret Service's actual setup for security reasons,
and because the film is still being developed.

4

VA Hospital Employees Still Use MS-DOS To Schedule Appointments

United States Navy

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?

3

The U.S. Copyright Office Still Requires TV Studios To Ship Physical Copies Of Shows

grm_wnr / Wiki Commons

Sending TV shows to the U.S. Copyright Office preserves those shows in the Library of Congress so that future generations can be baffled by the lack of mobile phones in Seinfeld or the inexplicable popularity of Everybody Loves Raymond. And since so much of that content is shot, consumed, and whined about in digital form, you'd think the Copyright Office would have a way to receive copies digitally too. Well, you'd be wrong. This is how Netflix has to send them Orange Is The New Black:

Adi Robertson / The Verge
Strangely, the tape seems considerably more worn during Laura Prepon's lesbian sex scenes.

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.

2

The Pentagon Uses A Payroll System From The '60s (And Soldiers Are Losing Pay Because Of It)

United States Army

The Defense Finance and Accounting Service, which is the agency responsible for soldier payroll, uses an archaic computer system written mostly in the '60s in a language called COBOL, which is the programming equivalent of Egyptian hieroglyphs. The system is so inept that DFAS employees constantly have to write down information from one computer, carry it across the office, and type it into another one. The 7 million lines of COBOL code that comprise the prehistoric system have no reference manual, and the availability of qualified programmers is constantly shrinking. Likely because half of them died in the Civil War.

Oracle
"Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth this program-"

1

U.S. Government Retiree Paperwork Is Processed By Hand In A Giant Underground Cave

Ricky Carioti / Washington Post

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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