Re: @handleoclast
@boltar
This is not apocryphal, I witnessed it happen. I still have one of their pre-launch publicity mouse mats.
Yes, they were not very computer literate. The company that provided the web server for their startup was the one I was employed by. That company was run by a fuckwit, albeit a fraudulently criminal one (if I ever meet him in a dark alley he's going to end up in hospital because of how he ripped me off). I wasn't involved in the Windows side of things, so I watched it all happen from relative safety.
The start-up was going to be an on-line hardware store with everything on offer. Down to small screwdrivers and up to pneumatic drills and road rollers. They worked out it was feasible because stuff like a road-roller is dispatched to the retailer when a customer orders one from the retailer, so they could have the manufacturer deliver direct to the customer. For the smaller stuff they had an arrangement with a distributor. So gazillions of products. Think of a cross between Amazon, Screwfix and eBay before any of those had arrived on the scene (or at least impinged on public awareness, because I wasn't aware of them at the time).
My idiot, crooked arshole of a boss set things up so the start-up updated their product list locally on Access, then painfully slowly uploaded the whole db to our server (over 56K dial-up), which spent six or seven hours importing it into SQL server so it could serve up product pages. A very, very, stupid way of doing it, but the only time I became aware of the technicalities was when it all went badly wrong and the start-up was blaming us for the problem. In a way it was our problem because we should have had them use Access as a front-end to our SQL Server (did I mention the boss was an idiot?) Even so, Access's internal db was borked, had been borked for years before that, and continued to be borked for years thereafter.
So yes, had my boss not been a fuckwit they wouldn't have gone under. But had Access's internal db not been a buggy pile of shit, they wouldn't have gone under (at least not for that reason).
Biting the hand that feeds IT
