My friend worked in fintech for awhile and the stories he told me absolutely frightened me.
For banks, if it isn’t broke, don’t fix it. If it is broke, run a cost-benefit analysis…does it cost us less in losses each year than it would to overhaul/fix? Then also don’t fix it.
The code bases he had to deal with were absolute garbage apparently with hokey patch upon hokey patch.
He discovered a password validation issue (for a bank I used to bank at…) but essentially you could have a close but not exact password entry and still be let in. It took them like 6mos to fix it because it wasn’t really being abused.
Who cares about running things on Windows 95, or 98, or ME for that matter? Well… ME. Obviously I’m not regularly using any of them today, but some of my most formative memories were made in this clunky boxy world. I didn’t really grow up with a lot of games or game consoles, but we had a computer and with the kind of patience you only have as a kid, I figured out things to be excited about. Just like watching movies and YouTubers would inspire me to want to make my own videos, I would use computers and be completely in awe of how people could come together to make an operating system. Little things would fascinate me like how did they use dots on a screen to make something look like it was 3D? It inspired me to try writing my own code and making my own icons. I would spend hours trying to make stuff even close to what I was seeing. We talk a lot about preservation nowadays, video games, and software in general, is in a uniquely tough situation because more than any other artform it’s tied to the medium it was released on. And more often than not, it’s just not financially viable to change that. Imagine if the only way to watch an old movie on a new TV was for the crew to go back and re-film half of it in 4K. I mean that didn’t stop George Lucas from trying, but you get my point. Sure, an operating system is more of a tool than a work of art, more of a butter churn than a Michelangelo, but that being said, it’s also something that was designed to connect with people. To make this cold metal machine feel like it was actually friendly and approachable. And it connected with me and helped inspired me to make things. It’s a big reason why I do what I do today. Preservation isn’t just about being able to use something. It’s not just about just having a virtual machine or an old computer lying around. It’s about keeping it alive in the modern world.
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