• droans@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    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.

    • banneryear1868@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      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.

      • RogueBanana@lemmy.zip
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        11 months ago

        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

        • banneryear1868@lemmy.world
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          11 months ago

          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.

      • droans@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        Oh it absolutely did not work properly. We lost a $300M lawsuit because the system would bill clients wrong.

        • banneryear1868@lemmy.world
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          11 months ago

          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.

    • afraid_of_zombies@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      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.