[Themaintainers] Why Do People Neglect Maintenance?

Wed Aug 7 14:03:41 EDT 2019

Hi all,
    On the point of whether this sort of no support situation
happens/happened elsewhere, you bet! Here’s one example from my current
research on technology and enterprises in postwar Hungary. After the
initial reconstruction of the country’s war damaged railroads, the new
communist regime did an inventory of surviving locomotives and rolling
stock. They found that the national railroad (MAV) possessed steam engines
from over fifteen manufacturers in five nations, some of them dating back
to the pre-WWI Austro-Hungarian Empire. Only three of the makers were still
in business, all in Western Europe, and Hungary had little hard cash to buy
spare parts. So the eight regional MAV service and repair centers spent the
next decade reproducing spare parts for all the engines that could be kept
going, using broken components to draft blueprints for an estimated 3000
varieties of rods, boilers, pistons, axles, wheels, etc., as MAV gradually
substituted electric traction and Diesel-electrics for thousands of ever
more decrepit steam locomotives. There’s lots more to the story, and
parallels in agricultural tractors and machine tools. But the necessity to
improvise in or after a crisis hse been with us for generations, when the
maker of a durable technology is absent.
     Cheers, Phil Scranton

On Wednesday, August 7, 2019, Julien Kirch <archiloque at archiloque.net>
wrote:

> Hello,
>
> From the maintenance point of view (and excluding the question of the
> quality of the system itself) COBOL is often a not so bad choice since it
> will still probably be available for a long time, several large vendors
> exists and compatibility is important for the community.
>
> You need to have money for the licenses, and to manage the risk of loosing
> knowledge of the system you build, but the technology is not a risk by
> itself.
>
> The situation is much worse for other tools from the same period, like RPG
> (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_RPG
> <https://nam02.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FIBM_RPG&data=02%7C01%7Cscranton%40scarletmail.rutgers.edu%7Cdf60a0cb441d462f0e0a08d71b4aff5f%7Cb92d2b234d35447093ff69aca6632ffe%7C1%7C1%7C637007881240875992&sdata=2Wrkrf5b7wQ%2F8%2FL4FRxU41TU0w8%2BVsojLM4QrjLptVE%3D&reserved=0>),
> Pacbase (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacbase
> <https://nam02.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FPacbase&data=02%7C01%7Cscranton%40scarletmail.rutgers.edu%7Cdf60a0cb441d462f0e0a08d71b4aff5f%7Cb92d2b234d35447093ff69aca6632ffe%7C1%7C1%7C637007881240875992&sdata=6xcdj1xRnh9rvur%2Bni1KMPa6LFNYCJ%2BSxgWo%2Bk%2FNjro%3D&reserved=0>),
> or custom C implementations : in these cases the technology is not
> maintained any more or is on low maintenance mode and tomorrow the sole
> vendor can decide to stop investing in it.
>
> Which means one day you can hit a bug and you can’t do anything: the
> system rely on a black box you don’t control and there’s nobody any more
> you can call to solve it.
>
> I don’t know if it’s something that happens outside of IT, or at least on
> this scale.
>
> Julien
>
>
> Le 7 août 2019 à 12:57, David Eddy <deddy at davideddy.com> a écrit :
>
> Bernardo -
>
> On Aug 07, 2019, at 6:20 AM, Bernardo Batiz-Lazo <
> b.batiz-lazo at bangor.ac.uk> wrote:
>
> have a bunch of stuff in Cobol also written in the 1970s and 1980s.
>
>
> If you’re going to pick on deal ol’ COBOL, at least spell it correctly.
>
> COBOL is an excellent language for what it does…
>
>
> Factoids:
>
> 1/ - there are some
> - 50 major software languages
> - 1,500 minor languages
> - a new language is introduced at the rate of one a month.
>
> 2/ - Here’s a URL for some 344 DBMS (database management system) engines:
> - • *extensive list of 300+ DBMSs   db-engines.com/en/rankings
> <https://nam02.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fdb-engines.com%2Fen%2Frankings&data=02%7C01%7Cscranton%40scarletmail.rutgers.edu%7Cdf60a0cb441d462f0e0a08d71b4aff5f%7Cb92d2b234d35447093ff69aca6632ffe%7C1%7C1%7C637007881240885989&sdata=g5PS7Avc%2FcqQK%2F%2F7tl1HwSm8ps%2BAU0%2FgcSTS9WP2v0A%3D&reserved=0>*
> https://www.db-engines.com/en/rankings
> <https://nam02.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.db-engines.com%2Fen%2Frankings&data=02%7C01%7Cscranton%40scarletmail.rutgers.edu%7Cdf60a0cb441d462f0e0a08d71b4aff5f%7Cb92d2b234d35447093ff69aca6632ffe%7C1%7C1%7C637007881240895988&sdata=5jgvi4nfYzVc6Wyz96KFoMXffNdVu%2Fc88Iy%2F1ka9Ghc%3D&reserved=0>
>
> Click on “DB-Engines Rankings” tab to get to list of DBMSs
>
> - do understand these rankings are based on POPULARITY, not objective
> usage statistics.
>
> - Wow!!!!  dBase has moved up to #36 from #39.  dBase (
> http://www.dbase.com/
> <https://nam02.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.dbase.com%2F&data=02%7C01%7Cscranton%40scarletmail.rutgers.edu%7Cdf60a0cb441d462f0e0a08d71b4aff5f%7Cb92d2b234d35447093ff69aca6632ffe%7C1%7C1%7C637007881240905982&sdata=oNKcvV121ZcvCSyxwQ5uQ2AiRKPf0aFgNsY4PP99nuI%3D&reserved=0>)
> was up to v12, but they’ve changed their branding now to dBase 2019.
>
>
>
>
>
> 3/ - We have no objective measures for software.  Software  —  clearly a
> very productive “tool”  —  is not considered a balance sheet asset.   See:
> Doug Laney’s popular “Infonomics."
>
> __________________
> David Eddy
> deddy at davideddy.com
>
>
>
>
>
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>
>

-- 
Philip Scranton, Emeritus Board of Governors Professor, History of Industry
& Technology,
Rutgers University;
Author, Enterprise, Organization and Technology in China: A Socialist
Experiment, 1950-1971
Palgrave Macmillan (2019).  BOOK LINK:
https://www.springer.com/us/book/9783030003975?wt_mc=ThirdParty.SpringerLink.3.EPR653.About_eBook#aboutBook
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