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Comment by enasterosophes | Hacker News Reader

When I worked for an alphabet agency, I had to develop apps for people deployed to Afghanistan. The only computers they had access to were running locked down Windows XP with no way to install anything new. They were stuck with Office because it was already vetted and installed.

Therefore I was stuck with Office too, even though I'm a Linux guy. I got a fair amount of kudos building some real frankensteins for them purely in VBA.

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This matches my experience as someone once deployed to the Middle East. I automated much of what I could using VBA on entirely airgapped XP computers.

Having been in a similar, but not the same, situation, I resorted to an HTML file with some JavaScript code in a script tag. Was IE locked from running, even though the machine was air gapped? Or did you find VBA more convenient that JavaScript?

> Was IE locked from running, even though the machine was air gapped? Or did you find VBA more convenient that JavaScript?

At least partly it was due to being in an environment where other people I worked with were already using VBA. They suggested VBA for the task, and they were able to help me get up to speed with it fairly quickly. And at that point in time I was still young enough to be open to trying new things just for the sake of it, my own opinions were not fully encrusted yet :)

I did dabble in javascript for a simple webapp for one small project, but that was kind of a tangent to what we usually worked on.

I've done this too. with modern browsers you can do a lot with JS and HTML5 without much of a backend.

especially since given IE on XP, I bet `new ActiveXObject("Here.We.Go")` would allow some truly <s>spectacular</s> horrifying things!

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