Infrastructure
The People Who Keep Forty-Year-Old Software Running
Payroll, pensions and the water bills of a small country still run on code older than the engineers maintaining it. Meet the night shift that keeps it alive.
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Technology correspondent
Daniel Okafor
Daniel Okafor is the magazine’s technology correspondent, covering infrastructure, old software, and the people paid to keep both running, from hospital pagers to a payroll system older than most of its maintainers. Before journalism he spent a decade as a systems administrator in the signaling office of the Corran Regional Railway, an experience he turned into the book Nothing Has Changed Since Tuesday. He lives in Corran, still carries a pager out of professional sympathy, and keeps a green-screen terminal on his desk that he insists is load-bearing.
4 pieces by Daniel
Engineering
Every Bridge Has Sensors Now. Nobody Is Reading Them.
Strain gauges, tilt meters and accelerometers stream millions of readings a day. The engineers meant to interpret them are a vanishing species.
Machines
A Data Centre Learns to Live Beside a Lake
It draws cold water in and sends warm water out. The town downstream wants to know who decided that was fine.
Hospitals
The Hospital Pagers That Refuse to Die
Smartphones can do everything a pager can, except work in a basement, last a week and never crash. Why the beep survives.