Maybe the real treasure was the optimizations we made and discarded along the way.

Indeed. I am very happy with some of the tricks that I developed (speeding up, and indeed allowing, Solaris C++ linking by prefiltering on MD5 hashes of canonicalised .o files -> nm, anyone?) even though they were lost without trace (yep, Lehman Brothers, where are my Imakefiles now?)...

They're probably as critical as ever at Barclays :)

I really hope not, given that that very old Solaris compiler should have been laid to rest many many years ago. Yes, some of my stuff had kinda made it into BarCap (even onto my desktop dev machine!) when I turned up there later, and even some at Nomura when I rocked up there again IIRC!

I recall working at a broker/dealer on Broadway where a curious sysadmin noticed a power cord that underneath an internal wall that fenced off "dead space." Said space turned out to contain a "forgotten" minicomputer living just outside a machine room.

I recall returning to a bank and discovering that router and load balancer admin passwords hadn't changed in seven years..

My likely overly cynical concern here is that this suggests trie-hard will soon end up abandoned, as you're making it sound like it is a stop-gap solution for you.