Eclipse.
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?
#72When 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.
I've been on a kick of reading books about computer history of the 80s/90s, and one of the weird things that I didn't know before I started was the fact that Hitachi got pretty deep into mainframes and they were a major IBM competitor for a time.
IIRC, they have reorganized a lot but are still around and have followed IBM's path into consulting and selling other people's hardware.
Re: What’s the jankiest piece of tech you’ve seen a company depend on?
#73I used to work at a regional telecom company, and one of the jobs I did there involved keeping part of the order processing system alive. It consisted of something on the order of 100 PCs running OS/2 (this was in the mid-90s), with 3270 emulators that would connect to the mainframes, scrape information on the order forms, and plug them into forms on Unix boxes for another part of the order process. And the reverse.
But, this software was notoriously unreliable. There were two of us trying to keep this system moving, and we couldn't go to lunch together because we couldn't step away from the system for more than half an hour without getting paged.
We had one person at the data center where these systems lived that would walk the aisles of machines, looking at the screens, and trying to decide if the PC was hung and needed rebooting. I wrote some code that would watch logfiles these machines generated and would alert if the log for a specific system hadn't updated in ~30 minutes, and we could then ask the person on the floor to check on it. But, some orders could take an hour to process, and weren't really hung. So the person would have to go eyeball the screen and see if it looked like it was working or not.
This was developed by the same team that spent a year developing a tool called "the blue GUI", and I went with them out to the service center that was going to be using it so they could show it off. If memory serves me, it was a giant window with a shitton of input fields laid out in columns and rows. How this was different from a spreadsheet, I really never understood, but a team of 10 had been working on this for a year.
The lead developer I went with was sour on the 4 hour drive back, because the management of the service center declared that it was totally useless.
Re: What’s the jankiest piece of tech you’ve seen a company depend on?
#74The Command and Control system for the Metropolitan Police (London, UK) is the baggage handling system from Heathrow Airport in the 1970s, with 'Luggage' renamed to 'Police Car' (or something similar).
Re: What’s the jankiest piece of tech you’ve seen a company depend on?
#75two years ago I was hired to work on a fairly medium company, they were rewriting their front end for the third time, using a new framework (previous two were deprecated). I offer to create our own component based framework but they dismissed me, soon I was off to a better job anyways. They should be on their 4th front end refactoring by now...
Re: What’s the jankiest piece of tech you’ve seen a company depend on?
#76In the server room of a state government agency, sitting on top of a server rack was an old, yellowing AST 128 desktop PC (pentium 128). It sat there with it's little green light glowing and no one paid much attention to it. One day, a newer employee unplugged it and put in the excess equipment pile. Later that day, people were trying to track down a state-wide outage of the business license issuance process. They tr…
Hmm. Makes a good story, but it sounds a bit apocryphal. What kind of new employee unplugs anything in a server room without significant vetting? Perhaps they hired an idiot, but most new employees wouldn't be that aggressive.
Re: What’s the jankiest piece of tech you’ve seen a company depend on?
#77I'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…
Old isn't janky... hmm... to me janky means duct tape and bubble gum.
Kind of like Docker, you mean?
Re: What’s the jankiest piece of tech you’ve seen a company depend on?
#78I'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…
A buddy of mine works for a company in a similar situation that rebuilds transmissions for industrial equipment. They were not allowed to upgrade their computers because the one piece of software that makes the whole company "work" is some ancient dBase system that is accessed through DOS. The bids they received to "modernize" it were astronomical mainly to nobody being around that actuall understood the bizLogic involved in a way to rebuild it.
I asked what happens if the PSU/HDD/etc of the machine running it dies? I was told that everyone retires. It was an actual conversation that had been given serious thought. At that time, the company was 30+ years old, privately owned and no employee had been there less than 15 years.
Re: What’s the jankiest piece of tech you’ve seen a company depend on?
#79In the server room of a state government agency, sitting on top of a server rack was an old, yellowing AST 128 desktop PC (pentium 128). It sat there with it's little green light glowing and no one paid much attention to it. One day, a newer employee unplugged it and put in the excess equipment pile. Later that day, people were trying to track down a state-wide outage of the business license issuance process. They tr…
Hmm. Makes a good story, but it sounds a bit apocryphal. What kind of new employee unplugs anything in a server room without significant vetting? Perhaps they hired an idiot, but most new employees wouldn't be that aggressive.
management
Re: What’s the jankiest piece of tech you’ve seen a company depend on?
#80I'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…
re: FoxPro - It's Visual FoxPro for Windows, which makes it a lot less ancient than 1988, but a significant number of voter registrations in Ohio are handled by a piece of software written in Visual FoxPro.
Amusingly the vendor had a mandate to add "2FA" to the application last year. They added TOTP to the "login". All the data is stored in DBF files that all users have read/write access to anyway (because the database engine runs in the user's context on the client PC-- the server is just a dumb disk drive).