Correct. Longer if you count people in the 80s working to fix affected code that caused problems for 20-to-25 year term financial arrangements and so forth. I'm not saying it was recent, just this is a good example and one I don't think many have sufficiently learned from (too many think it was a fuss over nothing, when really it was a fuss to make sure it was nothing).

> Plus, it's not a good thing that people are "pulled out of retirement" to fix things.

I make no claim that it is a good thing. Just that it happened, has happened far more than that one big event, and similar things will continue to happen at different scales.

I could (but for commercial and legal reasons, shouldn't and won't) name specific examples of companies relying on systems written in elderly languages/frameworks, apparently locked to old versions of software components or hardware that they just hope won't break before they finally get budget for something new (which isn't likely to happen for a reasonable definition of "soon" under the circumstances) because finding the right people to fix it would be somewhere between gloriously expensive and actually impossible.

Welcome to earth! We don't do it that way here.