The British ministry works with the help of an operating system 40 years ago

The Department of Work and Pensions of the United Kingdom (DWP) has announced a vacancy for the position of chief engineer (chief technology officer, CTO). CTO will manage the reorganization and modernization of the system, managing the annual investment in the modernization of 1 billion pounds. The system uses about 100,000 officials. Salary will be 135,000 pounds per year. Reports about it the CIO log.

Interesting in all this is the fact that to this day, the UK Pension Ministry is working under the ICL VME operating system, which was first installed there in 1974 on Fujitsu mainframes. Of course, the British have always been famous for their conservatism, but such a rarity unwittingly causes surprise - it’s no joke, the system has been running for more than 40 years. Of course, the old computer mainframes are no longer there, and the system works in a virtual environment under Linux on Intel PC servers . VME virtualization was created by Fujitsu, which also installed the original hardware. But to keep the system running, you have to work mostly with VME and write programs on Cobol, and the number of people who can and want to do it is steadily declining.


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The ministry is looking for a candidate with the experience of “migrating large organizations from aging equipment to next-generation technologies — the web, social networks, cloud technologies, Big Data and machine learning systems.” Candidates need to have a “passion for innovation” and “the ability to build business relationships with both technology start-ups and large techno-companies.”