We had "Rafał's computer" where there was a development environment for building our app on windows with mvc 6 and commercial QT 3 licence.
Every customer except one used our app on linux machines, and every developer had linux environment, but sometimes you had to debug or build a new version of the software for that one windows customer.
In that case we connected through remote desktop to Rafał's Computer and worked there, because nobody could figure out how to make it work anywhere else.
Rafał quit that company 1 year after I came to work there. When I was leaving 6 years later the "Rafał's Computer" was a part of critical infrastructure and there was an effort to virtualize it :) It's a miracle it worked so long without disk failing TBH :)
I'm sometimes wondering if now, 5 years later - they still have Rafał's Computer around. Hopefully they managed to virtualize it eventually :)
Similarly we had to ship something targeting WinCE 4, and the official "Platform Builder" toolkit wouldn't even install on Vista or above. So even into the Win10 era we had to have XP VMs to build from.
We had and probably still have somewhere a builder for our legacy software for pSOS on PowerQUICC. This build PC was forgotten, lost and then found several times while I was in the company and there is probably one person left who even knows what that is and how to work with it, and he is close to retirement. Thankfully target platform is in process of end of life and there will be no more development for it.
Every customer except one used our app on linux machines, and every developer had linux environment, but sometimes you had to debug or build a new version of the software for that one windows customer.
In that case we connected through remote desktop to Rafał's Computer and worked there, because nobody could figure out how to make it work anywhere else.
Rafał quit that company 1 year after I came to work there. When I was leaving 6 years later the "Rafał's Computer" was a part of critical infrastructure and there was an effort to virtualize it :) It's a miracle it worked so long without disk failing TBH :)
I'm sometimes wondering if now, 5 years later - they still have Rafał's Computer around. Hopefully they managed to virtualize it eventually :)