💾 Archived View for saintnet.tech › posts › gemlogs › 20200522_work_archeology.gmi captured on 2020-09-24 at 01:59:55. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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I currently have the fortune of working IT for a relatively old CS department at a big university which has been great for my interest in software archelogy. Every time we decomission a server I get to find more scripts, more weird files, more inside jokes from decades past.
(Unfortunately, the department never had a Gopher server so no luck on bringing that back)
As a younger person, it's been really interesting to see just *how much* of a university departments computer systems can be held together solely by Perl scripts. Less jokingly, the difference in what was done in-house 20 to 30 years ago is almost incredible. While today none of us are that afraid of getting our hands dirty, off-the-shelf stuff has gotten so much better and our group has gotten so much smaller that off-the-shell really is the way to go most of the time. Gone are the days of intricate, questionably documented Bash and Perl scripts. Services using hand-written rc.d scripts to bring everything up in the correct order. A ticketing system written entirely in T-SQL.
It's probably for the best that last one is gone.
On the other hand, sometimes I feel like my job these days is just putting lego blocks together. I'm not necesarily saying the past was better: I often work with a big PHP app my predecesor wrote back in the earl 2000s and guess what? Turns out just because you're a decent sysadmin doesn't mean you can code for shit. Same with our in-house backup system someone in the department developed back in the 90s; sure it was great back then, but now it's barely supported and I haven't gotten it to stop segfaulting for the past three months. NIH syndrome is bad and while it was necesary back then holding onto that logic is foolish. Using FOSS stuff and contributing back is almost always the better option.
Still, I feel like it's similar to loss of whimsey I see in our IT history. 20-30 years ago the IT group holding LAN parties, posting comics on the door, having creative Starcraft themed staff pages, beer lists, etc, etc ,etc. A lot more fun than the current "Why yes I'd be happy to set up a thiry node lab for you with only a days notice *eye twitch*" working environment (No offense anyone at work!). On the other hand, the IT group was probably the most disliked group in the department and was incredibly unprofessional: they used to have pin-up pictures on the wall and I found *20* DVDs of Japanese porn just lying in a crate. So yeah, probably for the best we straightened out a bit.
Anyway, old tech stuff is cool and I'm glad I get to work in a place where I can see it. I'm gonna make the most of it before my job gets subsumed by Google Suite.
(Can you tell I"m bitter about campus IT forced us to retire out email servers and migrate everyone to the central Gsuite?)