"I worked at a big corporation running on mainframes, in the stone age when using a computer meant writing jobs on punched cards and submitting them to be executed."
"Our usual job involved working on source files with a batch editor which interleaved commands to skip, modify, insert, and delete new lines into our program."
"I wrote some clever commands, probably something like a search and replace which was pretty spiffy back then."
"The manual didn't say that could happen. And there was no manual for the extensions."
An intern at a large corporation worked on mainframes using punched cards and a batch editor that interleaved commands to edit source files. The intern read vendor documentation and created new commands, likely a search-and-replace feature, to improve workflows. Unbeknownst to the intern, full-time staff had added custom extensions that altered the editor's behavior, causing the intern's code to overwrite many files. Management revoked the intern's access to the batch editor and later to console tasks after noticing risky actions. The intern remained employed and continued to be paid for the summer despite the restrictions.
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