Yes.  When the technology gets old enough so you can't easily
hire programmers to work it, and/or you can't get replacement
parts that allow it to continue running, the legacy system technology
starts to hurt.

We are currently completing the port of a half-million line
avionics application coded in JOVIAL,
a department of defense language left over from the days when
every branch of the military HAD to have its own programming language.
(Can you say, 1970?).    It runs on a 16 bit microprocessor,
for which the maintaining organization has a limited supply
stored somewhere in a refrigerator that I'd expect to be heavily
guarded.     The programmers are all retiring (or worse),
and the number of spare parts is disappearing.

That's a powerful motivation to migrate onto a more maintainable
technology.  In this case, moving to a current 32 bit CPU
and C.

20 years from now, they'll have to do it again.
They'll only be able to get 128 bit CPUs, and anybody
that remembers what Java looks like will be thinking
about retiring if they haven't already been promoted
into management.

"B52s: Fly the same Airplane (literally) that your grandfather flew."
(No, it isn't a B52 application).

--
Ira D. Baxter, Ph.D., CTO   512-250-1018
Semantic Designs, Inc.      www.semdesigns.com

<[log in to unmask]> wrote in message
news:3dc84a40$1@skycache-news.fidnet.com...
> Interesting. I must say, I am puzzled by the second sentence, "Constant
> technological change often weakens the business value of legacy systems,
> which have been developed over the years through huge investments." I
don't
> understand what the business value has to do with technological change.
> Business and marketplace changes, yes. But technological change? Is anyone
> really hurting that badly because they are still using EDI or HTML instead
> of XML?
>
> Greg Stigers
> http://www.cgiusa.com
>
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Mark Wonsil
> > Sent: Tuesday, November 05, 2002 3:35 PM
> > To: [log in to unmask]
> > Subject: FW: Issues and Challenges Facing Legacy Systems
> >
> > Issues and Challenges Facing Legacy Systems
> > By Federico Zoufaly
> >

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