I attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in the early 1980s and I flunked out of college in part because of spending too much time playing games on PLATO, particularly a MMO dungeon game called Avatar. The way things worked, the "free" (i.e. not connected to coursework) account I had could only be used at night. As a result, I and similar Avatar addicts would gather in the basement computer lab on Friday night and play until around 5AM or so, when the system went offline for maintenance. At that point we would go to IHOP for breakfast, then return at 6AM to play another couple of hours, until our accounts were booted off at 8AM.

Strangely enough, this was not conducive to good study habits! Luckily, after I flunked out, I managed to get accepted into another university which did NOT use PLATO! :-)

You can install software that emulates a PLATO terminal, allowing you to connect to a PLATO host (Cyber1.org).

Here's a video introduction to cyber1.org: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DgMG9NCWoaU
And here's a video showing a battle in Empire (a Star Trek space battle game): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vMPC1eG5cko

You'll need to view these videos large to really see what's happening.

The answers to my secret questions are always lies. I don't want to have to keep my mother's maiden name a secret, and if a friend asks the name of my first pet, I want to be able to answer honestly.

re: "they are programmed by whoever they could grab to throw at IT in the 90s."

The 90s? I think your concept of "old software" is a little off. We've got mainframe software written in the 80s, as well as some written in the 70s.

As for why they need to reprogram stuff at all, I'm guessing the problem is taking monthly salaries and replacing them with hourly wages. I work a different number of hours each month, depending on how many work days there are. But I get paid the same monthly salary regardless.

The software changes would probably be required to figure out how many work days there are in the month (don't forget holidays, as well as any unpaid time), as well as figure out the taxes, FICA, insurance premiums, etc.

Plus you need a bit of time to test it, because if it messes up just 1% of the employees' paychecks, that's thousands of angry people. (People get touchy when you don't give them what they were expected, or if you tell them they have to give some of it back because you screwed up.)