"In many ways, that's what made being a sysadmin in that era fun. There wasn't any shame in hacking together a solution."

hah true, and management was absolutely amazed! In the late 90s/early 2000s i worked for an independent pharmacy chain. I wrote what was basically just a proxy sitting between our dispensing systems and the central clearing networks for rx drug pricing. All it did was double check the price on the prescription (our stores weren't applying price updates which was a manual process at the time) and reject prescriptions that were priced wrong with a message telling the pharmacist to apply their price update. The CEO invented an annual award to give to me for the "work" hah