In around 2005 I had a pleasure of visiting a central office of a shipment company, and could see their setup for the whole country involved: 1. a hacked ISDN connection "borrowed" from the neighbor one floor below; 2. an entire shipment tracking done from a single Excel file kept on a Windows shared drive and edited simultaneously by different people. My respect for whatever dark magic Excel did back then was instilled deep into me, along with unending wonder about how didn't it all blow up spectacularly yet.