the.com/legacy programs
code so old it has tenure, seniority, and veto power over your entire roadmap.
means software still running critical operations long after the people who built it, and the reasons it works, have left the building.
from the term rode in on 1990s cobol migrations, when banks realized their 1970s mainframe code was too load-bearing to delete and too feared to touch.
cobol still runsan estimated 220 billion lines still in production
irs examplefiled taxes on 1960s-era assembly code until recently
chesterton's fencenobody removes the weird code, nobody remembers why
y2k fixcost roughly 300 billion dollars to patch old dates
for instance
irs individual master file — assembly language from 1960s, processed returns into the 2020s
cobol banking cores — still clear trillions in daily transactions worldwide
faa air traffic system — ran on floppy disks until 2019 upgrades
windows xp in atms — ran countless cash machines a decade past support end