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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?

#161

Post by robbedpeter »

dev_tty01 wrote: post #76
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…

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.

The new employee working under the direction of the slightly less new manager working to meet the demands of the recently appointed director to "clean out that server room, it looks unprofessional!"

Nobody knows anything, and documentation is rare.

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

#162

Post by thiht »

dev_tty01 wrote: post #76
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…

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.

I could imagine their manager telling them to unplug it, and that if it was still used they would know it soon enough.

That’s a way to build knowledge I guess :)

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

#163

Post by piva00 »

earthscienceman wrote: post #9

Oof. As someone who has never participated, every time a post like this shows up I'm reminded of how weird the twitterverse is. Such a microcosm of weirdness, the handles, the academic references (I don't care if you went to MIT for undergrad), the ego jockeying, the shared language of "almost-memes" like 'not all heroes wear capes', 'this is why we can't have nice things', and 'this is what peak performance is' etc…

Coming from the other side, as a professional SWE that helps my friends in academia with reviewing/debugging their code sometimes... You're absolutely right, some of the most mindfucking code I've seen was from academia. Some are pretty decent and elegant but mostly it's a janky mess of FORTRAN libraries being called in weird ways, code that isn't written at all to be read later on, etc.

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

#165

Post by lakkal »

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…

I'm working right this second on an application that originated in the mid-late 1980s in dBase II, then moved to FoxBase, then FoxPro and is currently Visual Foxpro. (and I've been developing/supporting this all along, since 1988) Might finally get phased out in 2022... maybe. It does what it does very, very well.

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

#166

Post by lakkal »

In 1988, I started working for a company whose software was written in dBase II and Foxbase. That was pretty cutting edge at the time. But, although they had run coax cable for an Arcnet Novell network, none of the workstations (8086 and 80286 running MSDOS) had network cards yet. So they were carrying a large (full size/height) 80MB ESDI drive from machine to machine on a padded tray and plugging it into external ESDI ports on the workstations to copy customer data to from it.

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

#167

Post by drewzero1 »

dylan604 wrote: post #149
diroussel wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assuming the battery is not soldered in.

In machines of this age, I don't think anyone would have considered soldering something in like that. That didn't happen until halfway through the 2000s.

Not exactly a CMOS chip, but the Dallas Semiconductor DS1287[1] real-time clock chip had a built-in battery that was notorious for failing.

[1] https://www.classic-computers.org.nz/blog/2009-10-10-renovat...

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

#168

Post by CRConrad »

FireBeyond wrote: post #158
slavboj wrote: post #51

A large insurance company as of X years ago implemented iteratively reweighted least squares in pure SQL running against the claim database to fit their risk models. Honestly their implementation was impressive, in a WTF way, but doing literally thousands of queries and then manual adjustments of coefficients meant it took days to fit models that would have taken seconds to download the relevant data and train a mode…

I worked for a health insurance claims benefit management software company whose flagship was written in a language called DB/C (random bonus, the two co-owners of the company felt that two spaces for a tab stop was too small, four too large, so had standardized on a three space tab). DB/C (or Databus) is a COBOL-esque language ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programming_Language_for_Busin... ). Over time, TCP/IP, so…

> (random bonus, the two co-owners of the company felt that two spaces for a tab stop was too small, four too large, so had standardized on a three space tab)

That's how I indent my code. Not just because I think it looks best, but as a small rebellion against the whole tech industry's over-fixation on powers of two.

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

#169

Post by CRConrad »

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.

They bought Pentaho, the ETL and BI tool maker, in 2015: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentaho

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

#170

Post by james_s_tayler »

bokluk wrote: post #44

JIRA

My previous team lead hated JIRA and would frequently rail on it during our agile ceremonies. Me who likes coming up acronyms would refer to it as that "Janky Irritating React App" during our ceremonies as a result. Good times.
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