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Comment by normanvalentine | Hacker News Reader

I'll admit to having joined the industry after 2005.

Can you say more about how easy it was to get stuff done back then? What was actually easier? Was Access just good and you didn't need to deal with building web apps?

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Access sucked. It didn’t scale. You could have a small team use one database just fine, but wiring it up to the other access databases was a nightmare. Version control was practically non-existent. Corrupt databases were routine. You would often have the “expert” that created the highly specific configuration depart the organization before anyone realized they were the only ones that held knowledge of who and what was connected to it. And don’t even get me started on the awful recorded macro code or insecure VBA.

Excel is arguably worse, if only because it was more accessible for less patient people. But at least Excel doesn’t offer you an entire armory of footguns at quite the same scale as Access did.

I think it's just nostalgia for a simpler, less complicated past. We do lots of things today that would've been impossible with Access and that we now take for granted. For example, most people today expect to access their system from anywhere via the internet; pulling up a specific invoice on their phone, for instance. That just wasn't possible with Access 2000. And if you tried building a web-accessible system on top of its database, you'd essentially be starting from scratch anyway. The reality is that the web is complicated because we want endless possibilities while staying fully connected.

Most businesses don't really operate like that though. That's what has been sold to us as an idea and we are blinded by the environments we work within in the tech industry. Really a hell of a lot of it is bums on seats in offices still.

One of the hilarious things I've seen recently was an ex partner of mine's hair salon paid for a SaaS booking system. It's a pile of junk. Doesn't work properly, screws up scheduling and finances and generally costs more time that it does some other way.

They literally went back to a paper bookings diary and just phone or whatsapp people if there's a problem.

Sure, which is why roughly 2/3 of the world's desktops are still running Windows. I actually met an accountant the other day (from Germany) who still uses the desktop version of Microsoft Excel (not the 365 web edition) because the old version works fine for his needs while the web one doesn't.

> They literally went back to a paper bookings diary and just phone or whatsapp people if there's a problem.

I couldn't book a place the other day because their online booking system was broken. It made me realize why most places and hotels use Booking.com or Airbnb. It's not just about discoverability; getting a booking system to actually work is a really hard problem.

But look at these two examples: MS Access wouldn't help in either case. For a booking system to be useful, people need to access the calendar online. These are things only made possible with web or mobile apps. Booking.com and Airbnb have a combined market cap of around a quarter trillion dollars. That's how valuable a functioning booking system really is.

It did scale fine. We pointed it at SQL Server.

Version control was in issue yes but you didn't really need it because ONE PERSON could literally do all the engineering work. You just copied the MDB file and suffixed it with the date. In reality, corrupt databases were a non-issue if you didn't shove MDBs on a network share and VBA was not a security risk here because the distribution of the MDBs was controlled.

What you just described is a sample size of one. I spent ten years supporting a 30k+ person company and never saw Access used in reasonable ways. It was always on a network share, data always stored in the local file instead of SQL, “engineering” done entirely by a power user that got a book on MS Access at the bookstore instead of by anyone with actual engineering experience.

There’s a reason people in IT hate Access. It’s not because the technology. It’s because of what organizational bad habits the technology enabled.

Sample size is irrelevant. The problem is bad people, not bad software.

It ran a 50 seat ERP system that managed over 1000 suppliers and 500 customers, did all invoicing, inventory/stock management, logistics and financials. In the hands of clue that is.

They did replace it with SAP eventually but this was at a 15x per seat cost multiplication.

There is still is a lot of stuff hiding out there that works like that which is used daily and has few issues. You just don't hear about it because the people building and operating it really don't give a crap and have no enthusiasm - it's a tool to do a job. As it should be.

Sample size is irrelevant to you, the sample size.

Best thing is have a look at a short tutorial https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubmwp8kbfPc

It has problems, as the other reply suggests, but most of those are easily surmountable in 2026.

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