What’s the jankiest piece of tech you’ve seen a company depend on?
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Re: What’s the jankiest piece of tech you’ve seen a company depend on?
#2Microsoft Access.
Re: What’s the jankiest piece of tech you’ve seen a company depend on?
#3I'll weigh in outside of Twitter. Back when I worked for a large telecom, we decided to move a datacenter from a mid-west, barely staffed site out to one of our larger datacenters.
This was a year-long several-hundred rack problem that culminated in a hellish weekend of running cables and powering things up. It was "all hands" in IT and didn't matter that I worked in a capacity that kept me far away from hardware most of the time -- I had past expertise in that area, I was called upon.
Everything went relatively smoothly until about three months later when I received a phone call from our department VP. Apparently a vendor that we billed for Cost of Access[0] had not paid us since we moved DCs; they hadn't received any bills and were happy not informing us of the problem. A long investigation resulted in the discovery that the bills were submitted electronically, by modem (this was 2008, not 1998). The modem phone line was moved and located at the new datacenter, hooked up to a USRobotics 56K modem, which faithfully dialed a number, connected at 1200 baud (?!) and submitted the bill. And we're talking a bill that's big enough to be noticed on quarterly reports.
The offending computer had been brought to my office building in the suite downstairs, and my VP said "You've got some experience with old hardware, can you just take a stab at it?" It wouldn't boot; the CMOS battery was bad. I noticed three numeric values printed on a label affixed to the case and realized, immediately, that these were IDE (ATA) drive geometry settings. So the CMOS battery failed a long time ago, and the engineer solved it by printing the numbers on the front of the case.
And what a PC it was ... an IBM NetVista circa somewhere near the year 2000. Running PC-DOS. It sat in a rack on a shelf surrounded by servers, completely ignored since it was hooked up to UPS, not accessible to the corporate network, and was never patched or rebooted[1]. It was an accidental somewhere-near-3/4-million-dollar-desktop-server.
[0] Cost of access for the kind of telecom that we were was, I think the largest non-staff expense the company had, but it also worked the other way -- we billed people CoA for our network.
[1] The device could not be accessed on our network except from one other host, via one port; it was as air-gapped as it could be and other than the few minutes spent "sending the bill" each month, it didn't carry any data of value.
Re: What’s the jankiest piece of tech you’ve seen a company depend on?
#4I would have said Excel, but that would be a lie. You can do a lot of stuff with Excel when done right. So I'd say the following:
Convoluted Excel sheets without documentation doing things the ERP system that is in place is supposed to do. Especially ones that are not feeding data back to said ERP.
Re: What’s the jankiest piece of tech you’ve seen a company depend on?
#5I've seen some 1980s shit running THIS YEAR.
I'm working on porting a foxpro database from 1988 that's running an active business which I won't talk about much before it's done, and have actually encountered in Costa Rica an auto parts shop in one of the sketchiest parts of the capital city of this country with a green on black phosphor screen running what looked like dBase III for what they were doing on old IBM PCs.
It's pretty crazy what's out there still. I think the one everyone here is familiar with but might not know is really ancient is the travel booking systems for your plane tickets and accommodations, dating back to the 1960s:
Karsten Nohl - Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego? (33c3) [1]
Re: What’s the jankiest piece of tech you’ve seen a company depend on?
#6When I was at Siemens, who had an astounding multi-national PKI on smart cards that integrated with everything, we had to use some software from Hitachi to change our passwords. It rarely worked IME.
Hitachi is a name that I think of for power tools and heavy equipment, but not for software.
Re: What’s the jankiest piece of tech you’ve seen a company depend on?
#7Web sites running on Mainframe, OS390. If any line of code/HTML is longer than 80 chars, it only reads the first line then stops. Because punch cards only took 80 chars.
Re: What’s the jankiest piece of tech you’ve seen a company depend on?
#8I've seen some 1980s shit running THIS YEAR. I'm working on porting a foxpro database from 1988 that's running an active business which I won't talk about much before it's done, and have actually encountered in Costa Rica an auto parts shop in one of the sketchiest parts of the capital city of this country with a green on black phosphor screen running what looked like dBase III for what they were doing on old IBM PCs…
>I'm working on porting a foxpro database from 1988 that's running an active business which I won't talk about much before it's done, and have actually encountered in Costa Rica an auto parts shop in one of the sketchiest parts of the capital city of this country with a green on black phosphor screen running what looked like dBase III for what they were doing on old IBM PCs.
This is amazing value for money. A simple system for a small business working reliably for 30-40 years. In our world of tool churn (often seemingly for its own sake), it's unfathomable. But this is often what the customer really wants from us, they're just afraid to ask out loud for fear of being laughed at.
Re: What’s the jankiest piece of tech you’ve seen a company depend on?
#9Oof. As someone who has never participated, every time a post like this shows up I'm reminded of how weird the twitterverse is. Such a microcosm of weirdness, the handles, the academic references (I don't care if you went to MIT for undergrad), the ego jockeying, the shared language of "almost-memes" like 'not all heroes wear capes', 'this is why we can't have nice things', and 'this is what peak performance is' etc et al. And tech bros navigate it as a game of sorts trying to embody some online peak performance version of themselves to signal "yes I'm part of the tech master race".
But! External cultural tear downs aside, I'd like to show some internal cultural self awareness:
Being mostly an academic but having done stints 'in industry' or collaborating with 'real' coders I can say without a doubt that all the jankiest tech lives, and thrives, in academia. Scripts that were written by some professor with no coding background in the early 90s continuing to output data for analysis today. Entire mega projects written by single-minded individuals trying to be the academic version of a 10x developer but they're creating 100x spaghetti code (I'm looking at you RHIC/CERN). Single matlab scripts that are 10s of thousands of lines long that take voltages and currents and output a number with an "uncertainty" that nobody has really ever bothered to externally validate or quality control besides the grad student who never finished his thesis 10 years ago (from an optics lab I worked in).
The list goes on and on. Hilariously, the most beautiful pieces of tech/code I've ever seen have also been in academia that will never see the light of day. There was this ~1000 line piece of OO code that ran a Kalman filter in near-real time on the all of the particles produced in Gold-Gold atom collisions (and simulations!) at RHIC that was probably the most elegant piece of work I've ever seen, written by a coffee chugging burnt out grad student that sat alone in the corner day in and day out.
Re: What’s the jankiest piece of tech you’ve seen a company depend on?
#10Web sites running on Mainframe, OS390. If any line of code/HTML is longer than 80 chars, it only reads the first line then stops. Because punch cards only took 80 chars.
I want to visit this site and marvel at this achievement.