My sister was called to do some work on code she'd written in the 1980's. She found her original change log notes in some of the files!
What’s the jankiest piece of tech you’ve seen a company depend on?
21–30 of 175 posts
Re: What’s the jankiest piece of tech you’ve seen a company depend on?
#22Most internally developed, private microservices.
Re: What’s the jankiest piece of tech you’ve seen a company depend on?
#23I'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…
Sometimes their good value, other times their roughly equivalent to using paper.
Re: What’s the jankiest piece of tech you’ve seen a company depend on?
#24us‑east‑1
More generally, modern cloud
Re: What’s the jankiest piece of tech you’ve seen a company depend on?
#25I'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…
Oh yeah, man, FoxPro... for a year or so in 2008 I was responsible for a FoxPro database of music venues and artists for an agency. Felt really interesing to maintain a system that's older than me.
When we modernized all desktops in the office, I set up Win2k in Qemu on each of them, which loaded the FoxPro thing from a shared network mount. I'm just realizing 19-year-old me never checked if FoxPro supported simultaneous access. It surely did, at least I hope so :-)
edit: However, 19-year-old me was smart enough NOT to touch that Solaris or whatever-it-was server hosting the FoxPro thing.
Re: What’s the jankiest piece of tech you’ve seen a company depend on?
#26Fortune 1000 company, our mail transfer agent for sending out certain mass mailings were four Macintoshes. Worse, they were never upgraded to MacOS X, because they were so legacy they couldn't be. They were also not officially supported by either desktop support or server support. Although server support had to get involved when our IP address space was reassigned (they got their IP addresses pre-NAT).
At a Fortune 100 company I had to spend a day debugging a print job sent from an IBM mainframe in New York City to a Unix print server, out to a printer in Mumbai.
At one VC funded startup, the first server the company ever bought had no backup system and could not be turned off. We had to rearrange the server room once and someone had to hold the server in the air due to the way it was plugged in as the room was rearranged. It took years to get the budget for the server to upgrade it to, the day the new server came in it was hijacked by the analytics group.
Re: What’s the jankiest piece of tech you’ve seen a company depend on?
#27A business critical application that was continuously pulling data from Novell file shares, DCOM remote controlling Excel and really long .BAT files to manipulate it, and FTPing it to other places with some abandonware FTP app. All on 3 shitty old PCs with "don't touch me" post-it notes on the front and hard monitor burn-in. In a break room next to a copier.
Re: What’s the jankiest piece of tech you’ve seen a company depend on?
#28Microsoft Equation Editor 3.0. The piece of add-in for MS Word that has been there since 1995, and finally removed in 2018 due to a security problem. Yet, they are still everywhere for work related to high school maths.
And there aren’t better replacements. I could type in the old equation editor blindfolded. Every keystroke has predictable behaviour. Ctrl-F for fractions, Ctrl-R for square roots. No other equation editors offered that. The new equation editor is not the same, I need to press so many unnecessary arrow keys just to get what I could have done before in half of the time.
Re: What’s the jankiest piece of tech you’ve seen a company depend on?
#29Web 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.
That is amazing.
I love quirky old tech-debt that people still work around. It means there's either a sysadmin that is super into it and knows everything from inside-out, or they're a sysadmin that's pulled all their hair out but damned if they don't keep it running!