Gregory's Server
This reminds me a lot of how things went during the whole outsourcing debacle of the mid-2000s. The nature of the documentation, the odd and simplistic technical choices, the obviously copied template code, and solutions that spec-lawyer their way to an unsatisfactory result.
@emc2 Yep, and even earlier. Yourdon's Decline and Fall of the American Programmer was written in 1992 and was discussing these problems with outsourcing.