🚀 go-pugleaf

 I worked for a short time with a company called Convergent Dealership
 Systems.. Hunt Valley, Md.

 A subsidiary of Convergent Technologies.. They have this massive
 application that runs every facet of a car dealership from interfacing
 to factory mainframes to managing sales and inventory .. 

 When they were originally bought by Convergent, they were ordered to
 port the whole damned mess to Unix. The old software was running on a 
 proprietary platform, which was no longer being manufactured.

 They did the exact thing.. Instead of spending money to re-write the
 applications form scratch, they wrote a virtual machine (cpu) under Unix.
 This was meant to be a temporary measure until they could start their
 re-write.. Three or four years later they are still using it. The old
 staff programmers still write their applications in the old instruction set,
 and run it interpreted under Unix.. 

 I was brought in to help them convert their printing to use the Unix lp
 spooler. A month later I was still trying to learn the old machine's 
 instruction set. It's amazing what length's marketing folk will go just
 to be able to say "our application runs under Unix" or in this case,
 CTIX ...gag...

 Implementing a virtual machine is a tremendous thing for a thesis or
 graduate project..  I was pretty impressed (even though the code looked
 like assembly even under C), however , it was such a waste of cpu cycles,
 performance and worse, was virtually impossible to port since they made 
 extensive use of non-standard system calls (i.e. notify) ..

  Just wanted to point out that the company mentioned in the previous article
 weren't alone in their madness.

 Len