Oh, you're an evil person for bringing those up. Now I'm going to have COM and CORBA nightmares for days! It still blows my mind that we managed to write half a

Oh, you're an evil person for bringing those up. Now I'm going to have COM and CORBA nightmares for days! It still blows my mind that we managed to write half a screenful of code, essentially just to call a function. On the bright side, I will never forget a manager of that era who was very good with buzzwords but not so good with the technologies behind them. We had some existing software built using COM, Microsoft had just announced the first version of .NET (though no-one quite knew what .NET actually meant yet) and the Internet was taking off as a mainstream technology for the general public. The manager in question would wander around the department asking us if we were using this new .COM framework to build our new software...