In the late 90s I worked for a small network solutions company. Cable infrastructure, lan, wan, email/file/printer servers. Most of our work was campus sized ne

In the late 90s I worked for a small network solutions company. Cable infrastructure, lan, wan, email/file/printer servers. Most of our work was campus sized networks. Military bases, hospitals, corporate campuses, etc. We did all our drawings in Visio which hadn't yet been purchased by Microsoft. Visio added VBA support around 97 or 98. As soon as they did myself and the other network engineer on staff, we didn't have any developers, wrote a similar system in our "spare time" to extract a bill of materials and generate a cost estimate. Included everything down to the number of rack screws. I ended up leaving about 3 months after it was done but they continued to use it for a few years until it was replaced by a COTS system.