As weird as it may seem, this might be a good argument in favor of Pascal. I despised learning it at uni, as it seems worthless, but is seems that it can still handle business-critical software for 20 years.
What OP didn’t tell you is that, due to its age, it’s running on an unpatched WinXP SP2 install and patching, upgrading to SP3, or to any newer Windows OS will break the software calls that version of Pascal relies upon.
You’re literally describing the system that controlled employee keyscan badges a couple of jobs ago…
That thing was fun to try and tie into the user disable/termination script that I wrote. I ended up having to just manipulate its DB tables manually in the script instead of going through an API that the software exposed, because it didn’t do that. Figuring out their fucked-up DB schema was an adventure on its own too.
I’m also describing the machine in my office that runs my $20,000 laser plotter/large format scanner. The software in the machine uses (Java?) over a web interface which was deprecated and removed from all browsers around 2012-14, iirc. The machine isn’t supported anymore and the only way to clear an error or update where it sends scans is using that interface. I have a XPSP2 machine running the internal IE6 browser which will still display the interface. Since I’m now a one-person office, and I use the scanner about 6 times a year, I keep that machine around in case I need to turn it on to update the scanner or clear a print error. Buying a new plotter isn’t worth the time/money - when it dies I’ll just farm out the work to a 3rd party vendor; but while it does work it’s convenient to have in-house.
