That’s a measure of success to me. Systems that have run for so long and continue to run effectively are to be commended, not ridiculed.

The article quotes the agency as mentioning the floppies not being the biggest worry. I wish it went into more detail of what shortcomings the current system has and what improvements such a shift to more modern infra would bring.

I like the part of the quote you omitted:

“We have to maintain programmers who are experts in the programming languages of the '90s in order to keep running our current system, so we have a technical debt that stretches back many decades,” Tumlin told San Francisco’s KQED in February 2023.

They say that as if most of the most popular languages in the '90s aren’t still in common use today. I guess what he really means is that they managed to pick something that was obscure proprietary garbage even back then, and should’ve known better.

Or you could just virtualize the machine in an emulator and run it from disk images. 🤷‍♂️

what, its not like they are near a technical mecca of any kinda out there in cali, of course they would be decades out of date!