Post #4030861

@ldcd@social.treehouse.systems At work we make half-million dollar fancy schmancy laser doohickeys used to make super top secret stuff. The most critical component in these devices is calibrated by an off-shelf metrology device controlled by mid 00s Windows XP machine that has seen nearly every one of its components replaced at least once. The Wintel of Theseus. We can't upgrade it because the magic piece of software that does magic things to calibrate the critical component was written long ago by a person who no longer works here and we are missing 15% of the codebase and the binary we have breaks in Windows 7 or beyond. And it uses a parallel port. o_0 We have a developer re-writing it as we speak - finally. But its been a tense decade hoping and praying the magic box continues to work (its image is the FIRST one IT checks when we do backup testing.)