Necessity is the mother of invention, indeed. But, the invention can be heinous.

My favorite encounter with such hacky tech was at an insurance broker's office. It was 3 years ago, and this company first of all still used 15" CRT screens (with burned-in images because they ran no screensavers). They opened up a remote Citrix session (which I only know because it took over a minute for the splash screen to disappear) which connected to a Windows 2000 server that displayed a vt100 terminal window that then connected to their insurance company mainframe. They couldn't use the mouse to navigate the interface, of course, only tab/alt-tab.

Somewhere there is disruption, but, really, where does one even begin? It's the technology equivalent of a court-appointed cleanout of a hoarders home.

You tell me. I work for an insurance company that bet the farm on Forté's 4GL technology (then bought by SUN and renamed Unified Development Server, and then killed).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forte_4GL

so I'm stuck maintaining a few hundred applications which are hacks and workarounds on top of the obsolete enterprise software.

The pay is very good for my country but I'm looking for my way out.