50 years ago the WWW didn't exist and there was no such thing as a servlet.
The system ran on a mainframe not 50 but 60 years ago. The only high level language at the time was FORTRAN, but this system was apparently written in assembly language.
Does anyone know the type of computer it ran on? The article it linked to says IBM mainframe but which model?
> The only high level language at the time was FORTRAN, but this system was apparently written in assembly language.
No direct insight to the actual system used, but FWIW IBM mainframe assembly IMHO seems 'surprisingly' user friendly due to the large amount of standard macros/routines provided, clear/direct integration with JCL, and the minimalist ethos of the OS. Take a look at some youtube videos for some examples, it actually looks like a fairly interesting/productive, if arcane, environment. Writing clean/well architected applications in it doesn't actually look like it would necessarily be a ridiculous notion.
Of course, how well any given production system was constructed and what cruft has accumulated in it over 50y is probably another story..
Having not worked on large scale systems like what I imagine they must be working with, is this really true? I would have thought that a modern framework would make things easier. I've certainly had life made easier by modern web frameworks like React and Angular, although the support timeline is more on the order of 2-3 years, rather than 20-30.
Not sure, what if you have an enterprise system that uses a few hundred docker containers and at some point in 10-20 years there's a major vulnerability that can only be fixed by breaking compatibility for one function? Securing that system could be significantly harder than fixing a monolithic system.
50 years ago the IRS had to build a webserver, the servlet application code, it had to build in fault tolerance without SQS or Kafka.
If built today, the IRS' entire system would probably run on Rails with JRuby, deployed with Docker and K8s, and be 1000x more maintainable.