My very first cloud

All this cloudy talks brough back some of my memories. Here is one story from 90s. I was called to save the fate of newborn TELCO who could not produce bills to customers in time and were running out of money. The company they hired to do it tried to generate that enormous print file that had to be sent to a printhouse using some scripts on Oracle (there was a lot of heavy calculations involved there). So basically they were doomed to fail. The end result is that their scripts would run for a day or two and then crash. So I took a notice that on their main floor where they had operators there were like hundreds of client care PC stations. So I wrote a little orchestrator and the processing server app that was placed on every workstation. No scripts, all native executables. The orchestrator would pull list of current accounts from a database split it equally by the number of available server apps and submit those partial lists to servers. Servers would then extract needed data from database into RAM do all the calculations, generate partial print file and send it back to the orchestrator. The orchestrator will merge those partials and generate complete print file. The whole thing took like an hour or so, do not remember exactly. Everyone was happy except one tech manager who did not like that it was implemented in language X instead of language Y. Obviously he was told to shut up and get lost. Getting 22 million dollars was way more important.