At the end of 2020 we did a big clean-up at work - old manuals for tape backup units, routers with notes about bad ports, floppy disks with long disused software, prismatic CDs with mysterious sharpie scribbles, an array of legacy cables, on and on... Decades of moving forward and leaving things behind.

My favorite two items from the cleanup were old handsets from a telephone setup that I believe date to the late 1990s and the box for Delphi Power Builder Software box. Mostly these are just items of amusement and nostalgia - fun techy anti-relics good for a knowing laugh.

But it turns out that Delphi and (different) phones are still in use in the business today: the Delphi is important but aging, sometimes painful and has largely been replaced by .NET code; the phone system is more sophisticated than handsets with labels. I'm glad we have moved on, but I have to admit that corded phones and Delphi look suspiciously functional...

In the IT area, when the motion detecting lights question my existence and leave me in the dark, the old relics seem to be giving me silent knowing glances, subtle suggestions that maybe I have been going in circles - relentlessly making things more complicated when these phones and that version of Delphi might have just done the entire job the whole time - scary ghost stories from long dead tech, I exit the IT area and head back to my desk in the Buying Office to calm my nerves with a YouTube video about the new improvements in the latest preview vNext version of .NET Core while downloading a .NET Rocks episode about a technology I don't yet know exists...