Ask HN: What's your proudest hack?

First, you might have overestimated the complexity of it. I tried to describe it as uncomplicated as possible without giving up the exact details of what it was, but I admit I might have failed at it. It was utterly trivial.

Basically we produced single packs and two-packs of a product and customers would order 1-n of them, sometimes with customizations.

The trivial but immensely tedious job was to make production and packing lists that took this into account.

I.e. with these orders:

Customer 1: 5 packs Customer 2: 3 packs

That would end up like

Customer 1: 2x2-packs + 1 single pack

Customer 2: 1x2pack + 1 single pack modification x

Total:

5 2-packs

+ 1 single pack

+ 1 single pack modification x

Of course a real production run would have hundreds of these.

What I did once I got hold of the list was just to integer division (or what it is called) by 2 on each row to get the number of double packs in one column, something like (original number - 2x doublePacks) to get a 1 or 0 for single pack and then make a sum at the bottom for all columns.

I might have made som checksums too.

As for modifications I cannot remember anymore, I might have added some color or something, but once the immensely tedious first part was done it wasn't much of a problem IIRC.

I had something similar. They installed Windows 95, but the DOS files Windows 3.1 files were still there too. I was able to open Solitaire, QBASIC, and other programs, including the Windows 3.1 registry editor, which can display and edit parts of the Windows 95 registry but not all of them. (The Windows 95 registry editor did not load, due to the policies)

Using VBA in Microsoft Word, I also had figured out, too.

Once the teacher wanted took the students to the computer lab to make greeting cards, but the program to do so was no longer in the menu; fortunately I knew where it was and was able to describe (using VBA in Microsoft Word) so that everyone in the class could load the program.

Later, they removed many restrictions but all files were reset when rebooting, so any program could be accessed without damaging it.

Something less prohibited was defining a password for print jobs to avoid getting them mixed up with everyone else's.

Great description!

My first IT job was supporting Point of Sale systems for service stations and other retail outlets. The company had some clients in really remote areas, and we provided 24 hour phone support. The software we supported was DOS based, and the configuration was really arcane. Lots of serial port hardware, but instead of configuring it on a COMn port, you needed to know the exact port address and interrupt. This incident happened back in the mid-90's, so very much pre-internet.

One Saturday afternoon a call was escalated to my mobile while I was at a friend's house. A remote site had a server failure, everything was down, and they couldn't pump petrol, help! I spent a little bit of investigation aided only by a non-technical console operator acting as my remote hands we determined the server was beyond repair. So then I talked the operator through installing the network operating system on a different computer, reinstalling the POS software, re-configuring all of the serial hardware for the ports on the new machine, setting up file sharing, restoring data backups, etc. Essentially building an entirely new system from scratch.

After 4-5 hours on the phone they were back up and pumping petrol again. All completely from memory, no computer, manuals or documentation to hand.