Kevin Murray, CIO of domestic brokerage and personal lines forAmerican International Group (AIG), had a mainframe full of fat-clientlegacy applications. He just trashed it in favor of newly writtenthin-client Java and XML applications.

Dan Roberts, CIO of the PMI Group, a mortgage insurance company, is inthe middle of Web-enabling his back-office legacy systems, a projecthe anticipates will take up to three years. However, he says it's"absolutely necessary" if his company is going to keep up with productdevelopment and customer demands.

Maria Fitzpatrick, CIO of PacifiCare Health Systems, just decided toget away from the multiple OpenVMS and Unix programs scattered acrossher company's business units, and upgrade to a single Web-enabledplatform. The project is part of a major effort to redesignPacifiCare's corporate strategy by unifying business processes acrossall units.

The list, long now, will get longer. Every day thousands ofenterprises rely on decades-old applications written in obsoleteprogramming languages that, along with the systems on which theyreside, are no longer supported by the application's creators - whoeverthey were and wherever they may be.

So why don't CIOs just pull the plug on these ancientapplications?