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Or you could call it “traditional”

27 February 2010 · 10:13 am · PEBKAC

The Secret Service is apparently running on something worse than Windows:

A classified review of the United States Secret Service’s computer technology found that the agency’s computers were fully operational only 60 percent of the time because of outdated systems and a reliance on a computer mainframe that dates to the 1980s, according to Sen. Joe Lieberman, I-Conn.

“We have here a premiere law enforcement organization in our country which is responsible for the security of the president and the vice president and other officials of our government, and they have to have better IT than they have,” said Lieberman, who is chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee.

I worked on a mainframe in the 1980s, and we had way better uptime than that. Then again, we could still get parts and service, even for the old monster drive systems that weighed as much as a small car and held as much data as a box of floppies.

By the end of the decade, I’d downsized to a System/36 with a whopping 200 MB of DASD. Nowadays, of course, we have files bigger than that.

Oh, and it’s “premier,” unless the agency is brand-new, which it ain’t.

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6 comments

  1. Lisa Paul »

    27 February 2010 · 11:29 am

    You’d think the CIA would at least have iPHones, with James Bondian apps.

    And thanks for going all “Grammar Police” on Lieberman.

  2. CGHill »

    27 February 2010 · 3:19 pm

    I try to assume, just because it’s reassuring to do so, that NSA, in its capacity as No Such Agency, has stuff worthy of Q’s workbench. Stories like this do not make these assumptions any easier.

  3. Jeffro »

    27 February 2010 · 3:38 pm

    Dang. I want my Sooper Sekrit Alphabet Soup Agencies to have goodies above and beyond what the rest of us can buy.

  4. CGHill »

    27 February 2010 · 4:14 pm

    From this post at RFAA:

    In a perfect world, any defense or NASA expenditure could be justified with the words “Because it’s AWESOME! Eh? EH?” If it makes a randomly selected 14-year-old boy drool around his braces, it gets funded. Granted, we’d end up with an arsenal of dinosaur-powered space lasers run by ninjas and the Swedish bikini team, but at least it would have full funding.

    At the very least, intelligence agencies should have stuff more exotic than, say, portable waterboards.

  5. Dick Stanley »

    28 February 2010 · 1:00 am

    A retired spook friend likes to laugh at conspiracy theorists. He firmly maintains that no agency of the federal government could find its ass with both hands. The best way to take the news is that, thereby, our freedom is preserved. If they were efficient…

  6. THE TEXAS SCRIBBLER » Government inefficiency is reassuring »

    1 March 2010 · 9:23 am

    [...] Via Dustbury. [...]

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