I once used excel & vba as an intranet webserver to collect weekly business analytics using user input into web forms from various departments.
A very little knowledge, no proper resourcing, no support, internal politics determined the effort should fail came together to produce such a "success"
Got a seedy story like that? Seedier than that? Let's hear it!
I wrote a Perl script for a client to provide CSV records as results to search queries sent by the main application, a custom tool in Microsoft Access my friend had created.
We managed to convince the client to install the Perl script on IIS on some shitty little Windows NT box they had. There was no cloud, and no web services hype yet. Linux was still an experiment for college kids to work with... Windows NT was the future of enterprise servers that did real work.
Anyhoo, our crappy little "web service" did the job. The client's sales personnel were able to upload, search for, and retrieve the process analyses they used to sell new equipment to their customers.
Ah, the 90s. I also wrote a tool to catch people setting up remote dialins so a) they had internet from home b) could share those links with friends to grab stuff from the products server. It ran on Linux and used a network sniffer to catch people.
ITG was crazy!