On Mon, Oct 1, 2018 at 1:29 PM Ben Sauvin <sau...@gmail.com> wrote: > > Legacy applications can also be a lot of fun.
For suitable values of the term. :-p > I used to work for a "high tech" company that ran a kind of ERP on DOS > machines. It was a mass of compiled COBOL, source code not available and the > company that produced it already gone out of business. Moving through > successive versions of Windows meant running this "ERP" in DOS boxes, which I > found cumbersome and frustrating. When I asked about the possibility of > moving to something a bit more modern, management explained that the cost of > reverse-engineering the data files, extracting the data and moving them to > another software stack would have been prohibitive. The wife of an old friend has been nominally retired for 7 years. But she still goes into the office one day a week. Her employer is a municipal government who has been migrating off a mainframe. She's a COBOL programmer, and there is still one critical application written in COBOL and not migrated that she supports. When it is finally migrated I expect to hear her shouts of "Free at last!" from here, and I'm an hour or so away from where they live by commuter rail. > I left them about three years before the year 2000. If they managed to find > some way to circumnavigate the Y2K buggery, it's certainly conceivable > they're still running that "ERP" after some twenty or thirty years, still in > DOS boxes even if they'd also since moved on to a more modern OS for their > desktops. Possible. But the issues of reverse engineering and extracting and migrating the data tend to be major reasons why outfits cling to old stuff. It's almost certain the data file formats were never documented, or if tehy were, teh documentation long ago lost any contact with the current reality of the file structures. > Their DOS install floppies are probably long since bit-rotted into oblivion. > I'd certainly like to think they could just install something like FreeDOS > and continue using their "ERP". They might be able to. I'd like to *think* they have long since migrated to something else, but I wouldn't bey money on it. ______ Dennis _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
