My first programming job in the 90s while I was still in college was building systems exactly like you describe (and they were as poorly built as you think hah). I worked for a small IT programming/consulting shop. We did small jobs like this in town in addition to installing networks, IVRs, etc... while working on larger software to sell (which is an entirely different/crazy story that involved burning CD demos and using a hand 'stomper' to label and then mail them out).

This post has more information than you realize.

What do you mean? Are you suggesting you can figure out who the company is?

I have a guess, but don’t want to offend the big cheese there so I’ll just see how this plays out.

In high school I got a gig rebuilding a pre 2000 Access DB + VBA front end in office 2003ish due to some kind of incompatibility that was preventing them from upgrading their PC's.

It was a chemical safety database. It was used to identify chemical risks and track the storage of the chemicals.

I pray near daily that someone else came along years later and rebuilt it in a modern language.

Ah yes, where testing just means "I hit save on the live database file and didn't received an angry call from accounting 2 minutes later"

One of our clients runs everything on access; from the office security, factory automation, ERP, crm, hrm, cms and more. We are moving them to a cloud platform that will allow them to not change one thing but save them a fortune not having to deal with the many issues access has.