Big trouble in ancient hardware...

The company I work for owns a subsidiary company that does business mainly in SA and VIC. This company uses a computer system called Aviion to collect all its retail business data (sales, inventory, invoices, etc). Yesterday, that system crashed. To say there was a bit of a panic would be like saying Bill Gates is reasonably well off.

But why the panic? Surely just swing over to the backup system, or at worst, implement disaster recovery plans. Not quite.

The system ran on a 20year old unsuported piece of hardware. It ran a ... wait for it... 25Mhz processor. (Yes - thats right - 25 MEGAhertz) It has 16Mb of ram. And a 4 Gb hard disk. Their IT guy, has been too scared to open the box, because he feared if he disturbed the layer of dust, it might not start up again. I kid you not, people.

The company had one person (a crazy Russian called Boris - no, seriously!) - who knew anything about the device. It seemed he spent most of his day at work, fiddling with the system to keep it running.

He had no system backup.

He had a disaster recovery plan - but it was 5 years old, and untested.

He didn't need system documentation because it was "all in his head".

*Sigh* It has been an... interesting... few days.