[davewasthere]

In 1997, I had to convert a legacy unix (SCO System V?) application's comms from X.25 to tcp/ip. Had the source code, but it was a weird case of the system you built it on didn't have a networking stack (or was somehow massively different that it was a pain to build and now unsupported) and while I'd written some basic networking bits (some telnet utils etc) in C on windows, but felt like this was a bit of a stretch of my skills/abilities.

Anyway, after playing around with different flavours of linux, I ended up with a rather simple solution that ended up being easy to install. Essentially it was a two line script that piped the serial port to the destination server IP address, and inbound tcp/ip piped to the serial port.

So just plugging this little (old school) 486 box in-between the serial port on the legacy system and an RJ-45 connector which plugged into the 'corporate' network and we not only had an upgraded comms layer, but we now had remote system management, which we never had before.

Think it saved $250k+ minimum replacement at next to no cost. Just me barrelling up and down the country installing the new hardware. Was a fun project in the end and started me down the linux appreciation route.