121–130 of 175 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is janky. Most of this thread describes OLD tech, but this is janky tech.
If you haven't worked at a place that entirely runs from a giant Excel file created by Janice who worked there for 2 years back in the 90s, then you just haven't lived.
Most of the answers are about software. Here's one about hardware, from my personal files. In one of my early businesses we manufactured these small boards with about 50 through-hole components. Think mid-80's range. I didn't have the money to buy any real manufacturing equipment at all. This was all self-funded, which, at that time in my life, meant thousands of dollars rather than hundreds of thousands or more. I b…
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?
Would be fun gear to get surplus now. I'm pretty sure there's easy cheap hardware to make your Pi either side of a SCSI bus now and then one could poke at the hardware capabilities.
Microsoft Access.
The bad bit was, the one person in the company who knew how to compile the extension had left years ago, so it only was available by copying a magic binary .so. It only ran on SPARC Solaris. While it had grown an embedded Python interpreter for more modern (for the time) development, the latest Python version it could run was 2.1, meaning a lot of Python 2.x features I was used to were missing.
This isn't really a janky dependency but... I also did consulting development with a friend for a large lab equipment company. It was impressed to me what a really super important client this was as they were one of a few companies licensed in the US to handle cocaine. So you'd think their security would be through the roof. When I got to their offices, I found that every staff member's desktop PC had Bonzi Buddy and several other pieces of malware cruft on it.
https://www.theregister.com/2001/04/12/missing_novell_server...
Then there were the awful scripts he wrote. I didn't know Linux at the time, but I remember there was a bash script for removing accounts from a server. You'd run /bin/removeaccount.sh $username. But woe was you if you forgot to give it an argument. The script was simply
#!/bin/sh
userdel $1
rm -rf /home/$1
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 gro…
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…
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 inv…
No need to hang your whole company on a single box's longevity.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I too have a need to keep old computers online and it's frustrating when the CMOS battery dies and all those super important motherboard settings that make it boot from a hard drive in the first place are lost, over and over on every reboot. Not everyone knows that old computers do not necessarily boot from the hard drive by default.
Why not just replace the CMOS battery so you only have to do it once every 4th blue moon vs everytime the thing reboots?
Heck, you can buy 2 CMOS batteries for a buck at the dollar tree. They'll last a year or more with the light usage that would be.