So some poor dude at some company(s) you used to work for pre-2000 had to comb through your legacy code too? Lol! The Fall of 1999 had a lot of software guys griping.
I didn't change employers, just groups within the same company ... and all of my shit was still where I left it. In most cases, whatever custom code I had written needed no maintenance, and if they needed a new feature, they always seemed to find me even if I was working in another department. Quid Pro Quo among managers.
No, I didn't write code there, I just maintained the equipment hardware wise. No one went through any code there on the stuff I worked with, it didn't matter because none of it knew the date or time. I doubt the sources existed in a modern readable form, some of the older stuff was still on paper tape, written by divisions that were long gone.
Probably some of the newer cellular stuff was looked at, but that would have been somewhere in NJ or one of the Bell Labs locations. Who knows where that is now, I know there are many 4ESS and 5ESS units out there, but who maintains them is beyond me.
I believe we were the reason that DEC stopped offering PDP-to-PC conversions in the latter half of the 90s, before they got bought. We had two guys from MA show up and look at our test setup, look worried, and leave. The website didn't mention anything after that. The division that took the things after the Columbus Works closed tried to convert them, but it was a matter of sticking a card on the Unibus to talk to a PC, but it still used the original hardware. By then, the only dual-CPU unit we had was failed, and it never worked again. That was the 5ESS internal test unit, I have to assume that they replaced it with something else.
We had two guys from MA show up and look at our test setup, look worried, and leave.
I know I've seen that look before! Lol!
You know these systems better than I ever did. I was essentially just a CS/EE user on the platform sporadically burning a lot of CPU time with code development and test program generation. I never had to lay a finger on the mainframe, I was busy enough with the test systems and toys on the test floor and characterization lab.
It was a different time. I like to think I'd enjoy working with that stuff again, but it's getting 50+ years old and things are just starting to fail because they fail.
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