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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?

#111

Post by spookthesunset »

h2odragon wrote: post #37

Around 1999 I did a bit of work for a small shop with DOS 3.3 machines sending data to CNC machines over SCSI cables. They'd bought this stuff when it was end of life upgraded by the previous owners, and gotten the technician that knew the system along with it... a decade before that. The tech had died several years ago and they were fully aware that when they had a problem with thsese machines that they couldn't fix…

Why couldn’t they upgrade any of the hardware?

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

#112

Post by agrippanux »

Not a company per say, but last week after going through the terminal 2 security checkpoint at San Diego Airport, I passed by a shelf holding a Windows laptop - probably 7-8 years old - open, running an application, with a sign taped to the shelf reading 'DO NOT CLOSE OR UNPLUG THIS LAPTOP!!!'.

I really, really, really wanted to close it to see what happened but I didn't want to spend the holidays in jail so I just chuckled and moved on.

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

#113

Post by adolph »

dghughes wrote: post #97

Not sure if this counts but I worked at a small casino and the servers managing the floor could barely function. The payment system was a mess too not just due to technical issues but also from "territorial" issues. The servers were IBM eServers servers old and out of date when they were purchased the warranty was extended multiple times. A Debain cluster for slot machine control, and a database server was also the d…

You might enjoy this Andy Weir short story:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/49661162-randomize

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

#115

Post by RapperWhoMadeIt »

The physics department were my girlfriend did her Master thesis had some really big issues with "technology management". A big optical setup which was used for measurements every week worked thanks to a yellowish 90s MS-Dos PC which was programmed by a now retired professor to automate the calibration of some lenses. The script running in this old PC had no backup, wasn't understood by any other person in the department and there was no documentation for it. Moreover, the PC and the script had no way of interacting with a network (as new lab automation equipment does) so there was no possibility to interact with the setup from other rooms, let alone from home. All this because the professor was too proud of his programming back then to even think that it was necessary to migrate to something more maintainable.

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

#116

Post by tyingq »

spookthesunset wrote: post #110
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.

I do have to give MS credit for PowerShell. There are things I don't like, but it's clearly well thought out and purpose made to fill a gap that existed for a long time.

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

#117

Post by kube-system »

LgWoodenBadger wrote: post #6

When 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.

Hitachi is the first name I think of when I think hard drives; back when HGST still existed they were always topping Backblaze's reliability charts.

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

#119

Post by JasonFruit »

literallyaduck wrote: post #2

Microsoft Access.

I know someday I will be punished for some of the evil, uncalled-for cruelty I have inflicted on poor Microsoft Access when it was all I had available to me. In my defense, I was on an informal development team (ahem) in a company with a dysfunctional tech culture, and we made do with what we had while fighting to get our hands on more appropriate tools.

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

#120

Post by joezydeco »

sjm-lbm wrote: post #72
LgWoodenBadger wrote: post #6

When 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.

The microprocessor arm of Hitachi merged with Mitsubishi's chip division and is now called Renesas.

https://www.renesas.com/us/en

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