The library I worked for as a teen used to process off-site reservations by writing them to a text file, which was automatically e-faxed to all locations every odd day.

If you worked at not-the-main-location, you couldn't do an off-site reservation, so on even days, you would print your list and fax it to the main site, who would re-enter it into the system.

This was 2005. And yes, it broke every month with an odd number of days.

downtime

minimal retraining

I feel your pain. Many good ideas that cause this are rejected. I have had ideas requiring one big downtime chunk rejected even though it reduces short but constant downtimes and mathematically the fix will pay for itself in a month easily.

Then the minimal retraining is frustrating when work environments and coworkers still pretend computers are some crazy device they’ve never seen before.

cleartext usernames and passwords as the URI components of GET requests

I’m not an infrastructure person. If the receiving web server doesn’t log the URI, and supposing the communication is encrypted with TLS, which removes the credentials from the URI, are there security concerns?

As weird as it may seem, this might be a good argument in favor of Pascal. I despised learning it at uni, as it seems worthless, but is seems that it can still handle business-critical software for 20 years.