5 ms·

I'm sorry. ;)

• snarfy 7y ago
  lol. It was a complete system with accounts, billing, 'tui' screens, all glued together by scripts, kron jobs, and awk text processing. It definitely embodied The Unix Way™ of everything is a file and small tools you can pipe in/out to to build larger systems. They did.
  • mikeyjk 7y ago
    How did that function in terms of maintenance? Was it clear where bugs existed or where new functionality needed added? I'm curious as I've never gotten to work on a system like that before.
    • snarfy 7y ago
      New features? They started rewriting it shortly after I was hired. Maintenance issues were always fixed by the grey beards. One of them was blind and used a talk box, a wyse terminal, and vi.
      • nickpeterson 7y ago
        That sounds like a man who could handle his abstractions.
    • dublin 7y ago
      It can work quite well, especially when combined with other tools that leverage the same kind of model, such as, say, Carlo Strozzi's NoSQL (his use of the term predates and is totally different from what we think of today as NoSQL), or even things like text/cli-based accounting systems. The modularity and focus on each thing doing one specific thing makes maintenance a breeze, assuming you're familiar with the tools.