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Comment by andix

5 hours ago

It was a customer management and billing system, for a specific industry. Tailored to local requirements and insurance regulations (a lot of things got billed to insurance). There is commercial software available for this purpose, but it's a very small target group, and the products are neither great, nor cheap.

Over time it even got extended to interface with a few external systems, mostly by reading and writing text files to specific locations.

It was deployed on one location with 2-5 concurrent users on the same database. The workflow was something like this: open customer/new customer, read/add notes, register products/services provided, print invoice for customer, print monthly invoice for insurance companies including all the required information (hundreds of pages).

> a few external systems, mostly by reading and writing text files to specific locations

The joys of large business transactions handled by .txt files (or equivalent) over FTP (or equivalent). It almost feels… like digital fax, in a way.