11–20 of 289 posts
my dad put a rubberband on an ibm mainframe printer in 75 to make it work while ibm showed up to fix it. They came in and didn't get it to work. So my dad as he needed to print millions of water bills on time put the rubberband back in and ran his job.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Cartalk/comments/10cwhb/til_how_to_...
The entire billing system at my first job was written as a console exe by a (brilliant) guy in during one-day session, working almost completely from live debugging breakpoints (against the production database). The result was less than beautiful, but there were rarely any problems with it. Needless to say anytime a billing inquiry came up it was his problem (which he was okay with since he owned the place).
Finance needed to do end-of-year stuff a couple of days past end-of-year. The system couldn't handle this, bad things would happen and data would change once end-of-year passes. Solution? A bash script that does: while true: set date to 4pm end-of-year sleep 1
This worked great, except if we wanted to work over the weekend, since if we left the screen alone for more than a few minutes, the screen lock would kick in and we'd lose the session.
Our solution? We purchased a small fan with an oscillation mode, and tied a mouse to it. We then had the fan drag the mouse ever so slightly back and forth whenever we wanted to step away from the remote session. Kept it going for weeks.
I worked at a place that had a large, distributed terminal network running on something like OSF or DEC Unix. It was 2001 and the thing was on life support while PCs were being rolled out. I was helping to rack my new database servers, which was next to this big lab table/shelf combo with like 16 terminals on it. When pulling a cable I banged my head on the table, then this big book fell on my hand. About 10 minutes…
