xkcd presents "What If?"

[Dartz]

And that just reminded me of a piece of technical software so ancient, it still required its input textfiles to be formatted in the manner of a punch card - and would utterly puke if one little piece of whitespace was wrong. Only, because of how the text editor worked, it was impossible to see where the error was. It dated back to the 70's, was written in Fortran, rewritten in Fortran-95 with a taky GUI, and is still in daily use, with an active user group online and a massive printed manual heavy enough to kill someone if you hit them over the head with it.

I managed to simulate a functioning power plant, and nearby grid elements to discover the reason for a system fault.... but only after spending days pouring through paper records to find machine test specifications and performance data dating back to the 60's - and further. Some of it predated my parents...
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--m(^0^)m-- Wot, no sig?