this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2024
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My previous work used two mission-critical software for continuous operation.
One was some guy's university project written in Object Pascal and PHP and largely untouched since 2006. I tried offering fixes (I also knew Pascal), but I was rejected every time because the cumulative downtime caused by software issues was not enough to justify the downtime caused by the update (obviously this was determined by a Middle Manager (derogatory)).
The other was (I shit you not) an Excel spreadsheet with 15000 lines and 500 columns. I tried making a copy and cleaning it up, but Excel couldn't handle the amount of data and ran out of memory.
Oh yeah, I remember the good ol' "Our whole business Logic is within this 30 tables spread sheet, that only one person can read, and don't you dare restarting that computer" times.
One person. Sitting in front of three monitors. In front of a spreadsheet that maxed out every resource of that computer. It was glorious.
We had two desktop PCs on the factory floor doing server stuff for a lot of assembly machines. We couldn't move them to proper hardware or virtualize them because the GUI and the server were built as one monolithic application (I still don't trust any Japanese company's developers as a result), so one computer was made the primary server for one half of the factory and the fallback for the other half, and vice versa, to solve the reliability issues stemming from the software's dogshit design.
What it couldn't solve was Windows' dogshit design. One early Monday morning, when we switched on the factory, Windows decided to force-update itself, then failed and bricked both computers. We spent half the shift with our thumbs up our asses periodically checking if tech support bothered to show up yet.
I have a lot of questions for whoever set that up in the first place, first and foremost of which is: why in the everlasting fuck was that computer ever attached to the internet? At most it should be allowed internal network access only.
Some required network services were located off-site. It could've been done in a secure way, but don't expect such considerations from the company described above. It's still better than the many XP and Win2000 production machines with the same internet access.
I can't say a lot because of confidentiality, but if you had seen the factory around the time I quit, having a Win10 computer with internet access would've been the least of your concerns. If we had OSHA here, that building would've kept them busy for a week.
It sounds glorious!