What’s the jankiest piece of tech you’ve seen a company depend on?

A long time ago I worked as the infrastructure & systems manager of an biostatistical institution at a medical university. The institution had a large staff of highly qualified professors and researchers and others, doing cutting edge work on huge datasets, even by today's standards. It was a really well funded research operation.

One day the phone starting ringing off the hook, the mail blew up and I had a large group of people outside my office (no open work space there!) being very upset all of the sudden. It seemed that almost all of them were relying on this quirky internal service for some input of sorts to what they were coding on/with, and all the computations and calculations and modelling broke without it. And apparently, it had broken. So ofc I start looking into it.

All I got was an IP address, and my system lists and IP registers showed nothing. I went on to look in an old patch panel registry, and found a reference that might be something to look into regarding where it physically might be located. But ofc the patch panel wasn't in use anymore, but I knew they sort of moved it 1:1 to a new panel in the far corner of a basement. Got a new lead on where the patch terminated, and went there only to find an empty room. A lone network cable ran from the connection on the wall, through a hole in the back wall to the next room. The other room had no marking, and my key pass didn't work. I called the maintenance guy who came running, and his keys didn't work either. So we took the decision to simply remove the lock by force.

Once inside, I come upon a very strange sight. Again an empty room, with only a very, VERY dusty desk and chair, with an ancient Unix machine and monitor. No one had touched that thing in many, MANY moons. It was disgusting. Someone had set it up to do its work, and then left the building, without notice or documentation, and it had been forgotten. It was a very Tron: Legacy kind of moment. I had a look at it and it said that the raid was downgraded, but still working but somehow halted the machine. I took a chance and rebooted it and after a while it came back online. All the researchers were happy again! I eventually took the liberty to move all the source code off the machine and got help from a co-worker to set it up in a new Linux environment. It worked almost out of the box, my co-worker made some minor fixes to make it compile. For all that I know, it's still running.

This is a old war story that I never will forget, very fun to talk about :)

I worked at a well known UK newspaper about 6-7 years ago. I found out that the daily print newspaper was edited in quarkXPress without a CMS. After publishing the newspaper each night, a team of night workers would come in and copy-paste articles into the tablet edition CMS before morning (for iPad & android tablet subscribers). Entirely by hand. The main website was on a totally separate CMS so the next day, news articles were copy-pasted into that CMS by an offshore team in India. Also by hand. There was also an archive team whose job it was to copy-paste everything into some other separate archival system. By hand.

An expect script I wrote that went through an interactive ncurses-like menu on an AIX host which started a batch job. That batch job processed all the financial transactions and closed the 'ledger' for the day. If it didn't run the bank would be completely fucked on the next day.

It was running on a VM I set up and I was pretty much the only person who knew it existed and what it was doing. Pretty janky lol

Nothing major, some as400 app running emulated on windows 95 (custom patched) machines. This was in 2007, in a large public office. I didn't expect to become a win95 user again, and enjoyed the useless login GUI a lot.

ps: the setup was twisted but this was the app I mention often in nostalgic threads. Nicest applicative I've used.

Back in the late 90's, one of the largest financial services firms in the US was still running its order-routing network on PDP-11s. One reason was that the code relied on the physical layout of the RK05 disks. They had people around the country scouring salvage auctions for spare parts that were no longer being manufactured.