Ha! Who knew. Off the BBC website. Long and amusing article – see the bit about the Veteran’s Administration. Floppy disc land.
“Many ATMs still operate on legacy Windows systems, including Windows XP and even Windows NT,” which launched in 1993, says Elvis Montiero, an ATM field technician based in Newark, New Jersey in the US. “The challenge with upgrading these machines lies in the high costs associated with hardware compatibility, regulatory compliance and the need to rewrite proprietary ATM software,” he says.
Microsoft ended official support for Windows XP in 2014, but Montiero says many ATMs still rely on these primordial systems thanks to their reliability, stability and integration with banking infrastructure.
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For the people who use this old technology, life can get tedious. For four years, psychiatrist Eric Zabriskie would show up to his job at the US Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) and start the day waiting for a computer to boot up. “I had to get to the clinic early because sometimes it would take 15 minutes just to log into the computer,” Zabriskie says. “Once you’re in you try to never log out. I’d hold on for dear life. It was excruciatingly slow.”
When it comes to decrepit computer systems that inhabit larger companies and organisations, the main culprit is generally “deferred maintenance”, says M Scott Ford, a software developer who specialises in updating legacy systems. “Organisations put all their attention on adding new features instead of investing those resources into making improvements on [the basics of] what already exists,” Ford says, which allows reliance on older technology to build up over time.
Most VA medical facilities manage health records using a suite of tools launched by the US government in 1997 called the Computerized Patient Record System (CPRS). But it works on top of an even older system called VistA – not to be confused with the Windows Vista operating system – which first debuted in 1985 and was originally built on the operating system MS-DOS.
The VA is now on its fourth attempt to overhaul this system after a series of fits and starts that dates back almost 25 years. The current plan is to replace it with a health record system used by the US Department of Defense by 2031. “VA remains steadfast in its commitment to implementing a modernised, interoperable Federal [electronic health record] system to improve health care delivery and positively impact patient care,” says VA press secretary Pete Kasperowicz. He says the system is already live at six VA sites and will be deployed at 19 out of 170 facilities by 2026.
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