I’ll start …
An AS400 back in the early 2000s , used as a legacy system for a leasing company. Some old dude used to come to support it for reporting and other functions. IIRC, there was a nice orange monochrome terminal that was connected to it.
I rarely had to touch it and I left the company before they migrated to a new platform.
I’m sure I’ve ran into more old tech, not sure why this stuck out in my memories.
In the late 90’s we had an old IBM XT tucked away in a corner of the computer room without a keyboard or monitor. It was serving as a “KarlBridge”, which converted from TCP/IP to SNA. It allowed us to communicate with the parent company’s AS400.
The software was on a floppy disk.
Ive seen more than a handful of teletype systems in old county government courthouses. They use them to process and file documents filed before the early to mid 1980’s
Just a few years ago I ran into a “mission critical” Windows 98 machine. It was running some custom database written in BASIC. All options to move the data to a modern machine and DB were deemed too expensive.
I’ve worked in an archive, which feels like cheating. I helped get a ca. 1920 glass slide projector up and running—main thing was replacing the light source with a projector bulb. Sadly, we only have one lens for it and that has a focus distance of “tennis court”, which is inconvenient.
Link to the projector (technically an epidiascope): https://archives.library.wcsu.edu/omeka/items/show/7798
We also use the microfilm readers a ton. One’s digital/connected to a modern computer. The other is analog–the sort you’d see in an early 1990s “child detective” type tv-show.
When I was in local government, they had a load of old sevrers - all sorts of things, most of which I couldn’t identify. There was a mainframe system which was heavily used via Wyse terminals - I’m not sure if it was actually running on a mainframe still at that point, but they definitely had some as I had to change all the backup tapes in lots of server rooms in the building. All sorts of things with what looked like reel to reel tapes in them. Shame even camera phones weren’t a thing (this was in early 2000s) or I’d have taken lots of photos. There were some Sun boxes as well.
I worked in accounting at an IT outsourcing firm. We had to have a telnet client installed on our computers so we could connect to the inventory management system. No idea what it actually ran on, but it was a text menu interface with ASCII borders that would turn into letters if your settings were wrong. Also incredibly slow. It always reminded me of dialing into a BBS when I was a kid.
