[campbellcj]

The scary thing is, I am just now finishing a project to migrate data from a massive, barely-documented 60's-70's punchcard app into our system (COTS app that does the same kind of stuff). Of course they don't actually use paper cards anymore, but it has the same architecture, only now they keypunch/edit the card data in an app not much more sophisticated than a mainframe text line editor (!?!?!?!) and run a "nightly batch update".

I have never been so flustered in my entire career; imagine trying to move enough card layouts to fill a 100+ page book, full of little 1-2 character "mystery codes", to a radically different Oracle-based data model, OLTP middle-tier app, and web UI.

I've had to deal with all kinds of legacy stuff in my day, and did some heavy mainframe work for 10 years, but this project is kicking my a$$. It might help if the people who actually built the app had documented it and/or weren't retired or dead...but no such luxury.