Back in 2005 I fell into a great gig at a gulf coast shipyard programming eight huge steel-cutting robots. They had previously been controlled by PCs running DOS (in 2005!) and the company that provided the control software was demanding a $2 million fee to upgrade the computers and software. The shipyard brought me in as a consultant to see if there was a cheaper way to control them; I investigated and found that it was really quite easy and I prepared a bid for around $50K for two months effort (which was about as padded as I could possibly make it). We had agreed to this in principle and then the fucking hurricanes (Katrina and Rita) hit and buried the robots under ten feet of mud. Alas my dreams of getting all eight robots to dance to Blue Danube.
Back in 2005 I fell into a great gig at a gulf coast shipyard programming eight huge steel-cutting robots. They had previously been controlled by PCs running DOS (in 2005!) and the company that provided the control software was demanding a $2 million fee to upgrade the computers and software. The shipyard brought me in as a consultant to see if there was a cheaper way to control them; I investigated and found that it was really quite easy and I prepared a bid for around $50K for two months effort (which was about as padded as I could possibly make it). We had agreed to this in principle and then the fucking hurricanes (Katrina and Rita) hit and buried the robots under ten feet of mud. Alas my dreams of getting all eight robots to dance to Blue Danube.