What is the oldest or most outdated tech you've ever had to maintain?

[Dani]

Assigned to support some ancient codebase or legacy system that should have been retired years ago? Maybe it was an old internal tool written in VB6, a critical system still running on COBOL, or a website that hadn’t been touched since the Netscape (eek!) days? Let's compare war stories, because I know you've got 'em. :-P

For me, it's maintaining Sphinx v2, which not only powers DaniWeb's search functionality, but also our user matching algorithm that our patents are based off of. James just got a staging server going with Sphinx 3.8 and I'm really not looking to the many, many hours it is going to take me converting over our sphinx.conf file to the new format.

[Reverend Jim]

I was given several systems to maintain when I was hired in 1979. Two of them were SPPCs (stored program process controllers), one at the Jenpeg generating station, and the other at Kettle Rapids (both in northern Manitoba). Both were completely written in assembler. But the worst was sonething call the Prodac P250. I don't even remember what the single app running on it did, but the source code was long gone. Whatever the app was it was table driven and the only way to modify it was to hand compile new table entries bit by bit then enter them in from the console with poke statements. One of my happiest early days at work was walking by the room one morning and smelling the sweet smell of a massive head crash of the system's drum storage.

[Dani]

This really makes me not feel too bad about Sphinx.

[Reverend Jim]

You have no idea of the "fun" you missed out on by being born so much later than me. On the plus side, I had to do maintenance on site 1-2 times a year and there was always time for some kick-ass fishing that far up north. I'm talking 3-foot long northern pike. One giant leap was taken when our chief hardware tech built a cassette loader so instead of loading the system from paper tape (3 hours) we could load it from audio cassette (1-2 minutes).