The NOTAM system was apparently running on old SPARC hardware so I’d easily believe that they haven’t been given enough budget to hire engineers and are basically keeping the lights on. One peril of the government funding model is that it’s effective at shoveling money to contracting companies but not having skilled oversight, so you tend to see lots of big projects which founder under their own weight.
SPARC gear would last that long though, I recall playing with a T1 system and opening the chassis to watch the Christmas tree of self check lights on every part of the board turn on. The entire system was designed to self check every component down to like, individual VRMs.
Yeah, that's both good and bad — it's great that it's reliable but that's also the kind of thing I could see people getting complacent about because, hey, it hasn't failed before.
It's static, until a contractor ignores the post-it note on their monitor that says, "IMPORTANT: ALWAYS add an extra newline BEFORE saving the file".
Once that happens, you have to hope that your backups work - why bother having disaster recovery drills for a static system?
Once you realize that your backups are hosed, you may experience a creeping suspicion that software is never truly static when human operators are involved.
It doesn’t need billions but it needs enough for dedicated staffing. Many federal agencies have the problem that they’re not given general funding for staff but are given money for large contract projects. It’s not uncommon for that to be structured in a way that, say, a big project has rooms full of developers, PMs, testers, etc. but something small has like one dude keeping it going when they can find time and a stream of unanswered requests to management asking go either fund or decommission it, hire a replacement for people who retired, etc. or that the big project which was supposed to replace it is years overdue.
I would not be surprised to learn that this was the case here, too.
