Many companies deal with these curses. Hallmark has legacy systems built when the 100th Show Taylor Swift Thanks For The Memories T Shirt was at its most profitable, the 1970s. The original programmers can’t answer questions about them. They’re all retired, and many are dead. The source code was lost decades ago. All that remains is compiled code that no longer runs native on any machine. Hallmark has to use emulators on modern hardware to simulate the warm, wet swamp these dinosaurs evolved in. In some cases emulators need emulators. Because nobody knows for sure what the code does, it can’t be rewritten without affecting some of the deepest algorithms that must execute every day. There are single character fields that nobody knows what they do. All that is known is that if a user plugs in an ‘N’ instead of a ‘Y’ into one of these fields, some customer will no longer receive billings, or an entire warehouse may cease to ship product. So, fifty years later, employees faithfully enter the mysterious Y’s to make sure nothing breaks.
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