Loved your story. And because it's what we do here, I'll mention my best similar war story. I created a bowling alley scoring system in, I think, 1990. It was b

Loved your story. And because it's what we do here, I'll mention my best similar war story. I created a bowling alley scoring system in, I think, 1990. It was basically an embedded system, using commodity PCs (one PC per two lanes) networked together with a master PC running another one of my programs as a check-in and control console. I used Turbo C V2 I think it was, with my own home rolled DOS windowing library of the kind that was ubiquitous at the time. Basically it was a smell-of-an-oily-rag development for a friend of mine who had taken over a near derelict 20 lane bowling alley and was upgrading it from "manual" scoring to "computer" scoring but couldn't afford a 100K "automatic" scoring system from Brunswick or the other big player (can't remember their name). Anyway, it was a successful and fun project, but after 8 years or so the bowling alley was gutted by fire. Years later I was travelling through a small provincial town and saw a 10 pin bowling alley. Something told me to stop the car and go in. What do you know, there was my whole system, lanes plus controller, running a small 8 lane setup. Talking to the guy (potentially a mistake, what if he wanted after sales service :- ) it transpired he'd bought the equipment in the (literal) fire sale and figured out how to hook up the network and get it all going. He'd even split it in two and got it running another system in another nearby town. I was seriously impressed that he'd managed that actually.