I once worked on a project for one of the largest vendors of chemical lab equipment. The application was in... frickin' Microsoft Access, not my choice. This wo

I once worked on a project for one of the largest vendors of chemical lab equipment. The application was in... frickin' Microsoft Access, not my choice. This would've been the 90s. The idea is that the sales person would enter in what the lab needed to do and the database would show them the equipment they needed. Anyway, we eventually developed a feature that allowed the application to copy out the lab process and equipment list to a separate database, zip it up, and FTP it to a server. It would also export a CSV file with the name of the lab, salesperson, date of sale, and other searchable information and FTP that up too. I wrote a "web service" (this was late 90s, before that term was cool) that would collect up these CSV files, aggregate them in one big CSV file, and then from within that application that CSV file could be searched and the appropriate ZIP file downloaded and merged with the local database. It was written in Perl and ran as a CGI script on some internal Windows NT machine's IIS instance. It was janky as all get-out, but it worked and we did it a couple of years before the big web services mania hit.