On 10/15/2013 3:53 PM, Duffy wrote:
I remember reading years ago a
company had a contract to redo the IRS software and they wasted
something like three or $4 billion and it never did work! We could
definitely do that. LOL!
My penultimate job before retirement was consulting work at the IRS.
While I was involved in only the reporting phase of things (GAO wanted
more information and tighter controls over receipts and how funds were
allocated), it was an eye opener. When the IRS switched to computerized
processing, they had an immediate problem of scale. One shortcut was to
record all dates in two bytes - year and week (and they used a 0 year
value as a special flag, which led to lots of problems at Y2K). Packed
data were stored without a sign nibble, instead the last byte was
created from a translate table. Prior to cartridges, they paid IBM to
provide modifications to the system to handle tape files with 100 volume
serials, but the modifications did not include all components.
All updates and reports were done on a weekly basis, in ten parallel
runs, each operating on a portion of the master files (on cartridge).
When there were (routine?) problems, it could take a week to completely
process. If I recall, the contract was for on-line data retrieval and
updating?
It reminded me a bit of Rube Goldberg contraptions - ingenious, but you
wonder how it ever worked. Had I been offered the contract with complete
information, I might not have taken it, but I can see were a large
company would.
Gerhard Postpischil
Bradford, Vermont
----------------------------------------------------------------------
For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions,
send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
