ManMan - Woozle Writes Code

It was written (as with most DEC stuff) for TTY terminals, and didn't know anything about modern newfangled relational databases.

As the PC era gradually edged its way into the front office, people started writing their own little data apps in MS Access, some of which used various kluges to grab bits of data out of ManMan. Some of them were in Access 7 and some were in Access 2, and they used different methods for talking to the DEC machine, and some were reliable and some had to be babied by their authors much of the time... you get the idea.

By the time I came on board, there were maybe a couple dozen of these apps, and very little documentation of how any of them worked or what they were supposed to do – but it was clear that they were being used regularly, and (especially given the increasing number of times IT had to be called in to fix one or another of them) that front office operations depended on them heavily.

So one large part of this was what we called the Augean Stables project: document the intended purpose of each of these apps, look for any redundancy, y2k-remediate them (y2k remediation was, I think, the reason we got clearance to do any of this cleanup), and get them working according to spec.

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