Comment by AviationAtom
20 hours ago
You missed a fun part of that story! The person who programmed it was a kid in the district at the time. They continued to hire him to come back and maintain it any time they had issues, which apparently was fairly rare.
And back in the 90s, before anybody knew anything about risk or "bus factor", that might've made sense. But it's no surprise that they paid a pretty penny for an actual support contract after decommissioning that system.