Oh yeah, on one laptop there is a DOS app written in Dataflex[0] from the early '80's. I don't really use it myself, it's leftover from an IT project. This wa

Oh yeah, on one laptop there is a DOS app written in Dataflex[0] from the early '80's. I don't really use it myself, it's leftover from an IT project. This was from an industrial facility where I had done field training back in 1982. Their mainframe had a "public" terminal where contractors had access to their inventory control system, so whoever was on-site had to wait for their turn at the green monochrome dumb terminal, then continue to wait for our printouts to appear afterward. Apparently sometime between then and 2019, I would imagine they might have replaced the mainframe with a PC-based server, but it would be difficult to be sure. Expected steps could have included first simply replacing the dumb terminal with a PC on the desk for contractor use instead, no differently than the rest of their office people would want. But for all I know they very well could have had the latest modern server gear back there in a rack somewhere. You would never know the difference. Regardless, by 2019 there had been no more public terminal for a while. Each contractor had their own laptop to access the facility system, still running the same desktop Dataflex program since 1983 on a DOS platform. Laptops weren't around back then, so that's a clue. Without that, a contractor was useless, so the incentive had always been there since the first person figured this out in the 21st century. At this employer, when we wanted to get in there, our IT guys had no luck at all. The plant couldn't help much, they cloned their own systems in a convoluted way rather than revive from decades-old files and that was it. I was provided with a Windows 7 laptop that successfully ran Dataflex to work from, but more than one person had probably never known how to prepare these to begin with. You definitely had to be able to take your data with you and print it later on a non-DOS printer. First made it run on bare metal, then hammered away until it ran self-contained on a Windows 10 laptop and connected properly to the system when on-site, just like everybody else had who treated the old laptops having Dataflex like gold, since it was like their ticket in through the gate of the facility. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DataFlex https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DataFlex