Here is a Question. How much of the Internet’s Backbone is obsolete. Code that no one knows what it does or how it works?

Let me give you an example: –

I have recently been integrating my companies systems into several of the Major Telecommunications Companies own systems. Now you expect that the big boys, who I will not name to protect them, lets call them “Busby”, to be very organised and up to date. Well you would be wrong!

To send data from our system to theirs there is a very STRICT file format you must use, which is defined in a 100+ page document (Which I still have not read. Hey I’m a geek we don’t do documentation!). This file format is defined to an exact number of characters per row, and what you can use.  Well while creating the interface from my system to theirs I was slightly confused by several of the fields I had to supply, since most of them stated I could not use these fields, but I must send them. And my all time favorite, an 18 character historical field of which only 3 characters had ever been used, the first which hand to be a 1 or the system broke (they were not sure why), the third must always be an A (due to some old link in that was no longer used, but part of the system) and the second character which you were allowed to use, had the choice of “y” or “y”.

So if there is vast amounts of code, flags, systems in This one example that no living person knows what they are, or if they can be safely removed, how much is there across all the worlds systems.

I think if we had a clean up we could free up about 70% of the worlds data storage, and free up the INTERNET to run faster, and have more space for websites :0)