From theregister.co.uk
‘Never assume soon means less than lifetime of Universe… in software’
It’s the end of the working week – for most of us. Time to kick back, brew a morning cuppa and delve into this week’s On Call, our weekly readers’ column of tech traumas.
This time, we meet “Ted”, who tells us about a time he worked for an outsourcer in a government department that got into a pickle over licensing for a very old piece of kit.
“One of its core processes was a long serving scan and optical character recognition [OCR] program using a CDE interface running on propriety Unix servers fed by Windows work stations and other hardware,” he said.
The hardware, firmware and OS were all unpatched and out of date – “to avoid the risks of changes breaking something”, Ted revealed.