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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?

#101

Post by nisegami »

hpen wrote: post #95
GartzenDeHaes wrote: post #38

In 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…

Any idea why they would use this architecture?

>In the server room of a state government agency

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

#102

Post by nindalf »

AdImpression.php is a multi thousand line file in Facebook’s monorepo that supports billions of dollars in revenue. It has the best/worst ratio (depending on your perspective) of code quality/readability to revenue generated that I’ve ever seen.

What’s impressive is how many attempts, both successful and less successful have been made over the years to improve it. Refactoring this file isn’t easy because any change could potentially lead to millions being lost. But people keep at it.

It actually looks pretty decent nowadays compared to a few years ago. I believe it has type annotations now but I haven’t seen it in a long time.

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

#103

Post by ska »

Retric wrote: post #23
kspacewalk2 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

Sometimes paper is great value too.

I'm not saying their aren't horror-shows out there, but technologists drink far too much of their own kool aid, as class.

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

#104

Post by spookthesunset »

ethbr0 wrote: post #90
mickeyp wrote: post #40

I have many stories. Here's a fun one. I worked for a company a long time ago that traded with companies all around the world. A lot of their customers were small businesses in rural Africa, South America, etc. and they in turn had local banks they used to facilitate payments to and from. A large number of these banks did not have a reliable internet connection, or if they did, they most assuredly didn't use it for p…

> instructions that were clearly invented in the typewriter era and then hoisted, kicking and screaming, into the digital age with nary a change Based on experience, any time I see a static number of fields of a specific type on a digital record, I assume it's because that's how many blanks there were on the preceding paper form.

You mean the paper form with 10 “blanks” for your address? Thereby ensuring the address would never fit in the space required?

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

#106

Post by [deleted] »

jamal-kumar wrote: post #5

I'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…

[deleted]

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

#107

Post by spookthesunset »

Mc91 wrote: post #26

Fortune 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 1…

> 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.

And for better or for worse this is why teams love using the cloud. It goes a long way toward bypassing “old school” IT departments :-)

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

#108

Post by Maursault »

Some time ago I was working as first mate on a ship ostensibly for civilian transportation, but most of the business was spent as a shipping company. The long haul freighter that was the core of the business was maybe 60-70 years old, and we rode it hard. Often it would break down in transit, and we'd have to make unscheduled stops for repair. The ship used analog computers to control propulsion and navigation, and the damn compressor was constantly on the fritz. Once we took on a ragged pair of passengers at a backwater port, an old man with a snot-nosed kid. When they got to the hanger, the boy says, "what a piece of junk," and the captain explained "she may not look like much, but she's got it where it counts, kid."

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

#109

Post by kingcharles »

mickeyp wrote: post #40

I have many stories. Here's a fun one. I worked for a company a long time ago that traded with companies all around the world. A lot of their customers were small businesses in rural Africa, South America, etc. and they in turn had local banks they used to facilitate payments to and from. A large number of these banks did not have a reliable internet connection, or if they did, they most assuredly didn't use it for p…

Yowzers. I've not seen any TELEX equipment in over 30 years. Even then it was outdated.

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

#110

Post by spookthesunset »

tyingq wrote: post #27

A 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.

I remember the first time I saw a BAT file that had a conditional in it. Mother of god. I needed eye bleach.

If your BAT file has a conditional, you are using the wrong tool. BAT files should be completely top to bottom with no branching. Anything else is madness.

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