https://medium.com/@bellmar/the-land-before-binary-cc705d5bdd70

In the early days of computing, 1 + 1 didn’t always equal 10

In the summer of 2016, USDS assigned me to the IRS to work on a project called Online Accounts. When on assignment I tend to wander, because helping out big complex software projects rarely involves simple straight forward advice or solutions. You have to figure that before you showed up the agency has probably been through many rounds of expensive consultants, working groups, maybe even a few research and development centers. If getting things on the right track was a matter of saying “go to the cloud”, someone else would have charged the government at least $350K to hear them say it.