My first internship was with a company on IBM RPG. My parents were literally not born when that system came out. We had to use telnet to talk to it. I am sure they are still on it. Most people didn’t even use it, they had a system of paper notebooks.
To me its amazing they’ve been able to use the same system for that long, it must cost almost nothing to run vs a “proper” system. Kind of assuming it wasn’t a constant headache cause then it would be stupid to keep it around.
That’s true and I’ve seen this thing a lot to the point people were buying assorted spare parts for a refrigerator sized server circa 1998 almost 20 years later while the entire business was complaining about how slow it was for a majority of those years. Our data center dates back to the 80s so there’s some great artifacts still lurking around.
My old company had a revenue system built in-house that only could run on MS-DOS. We needed a VM just to use it.
I left that company in 2019 and they were still using it.
My first internship was with a company on IBM RPG. My parents were literally not born when that system came out. We had to use telnet to talk to it. I am sure they are still on it. Most people didn’t even use it, they had a system of paper notebooks.
To me its amazing they’ve been able to use the same system for that long, it must cost almost nothing to run vs a “proper” system. Kind of assuming it wasn’t a constant headache cause then it would be stupid to keep it around.
Migration is expensive and time consuming so wouldn’t be surprised if laziness played a major role in that even if its obviously a problem
That’s true and I’ve seen this thing a lot to the point people were buying assorted spare parts for a refrigerator sized server circa 1998 almost 20 years later while the entire business was complaining about how slow it was for a majority of those years. Our data center dates back to the 80s so there’s some great artifacts still lurking around.
Oh it absolutely did not work properly. We lost a $300M lawsuit because the system would bill clients wrong.
rofl that’s kind of amazing then. I’m used to legacy stuff that nobody wants to touch because it’s functioning how it’s supposed to.