Autocoder

Went to the TechVibe Recruitment Event at the Waterloo Inn last night. Met knew people and someone I've talked to over the phone but never actually met. It was a nice event. I hope they have more of them.

I was reminded of an assignment years ago. I was working for a consulting firm and got an assignment at an insurance company to re-write a report program in PL1 that had been written in Autocoder. Of course I was their second choice. It seems the 1st choice walked in Monday, looked at the Autocoder manual and left. I went in Tuesday. Actually it was a subprogram called from another module.
There was a little concern as to whether I could do it, which was understandable considering the events from the previous day.




I read the manual, started falling asleep and asked for copies of the reports showing the control breaks. One Team Leader gave me two reports of about 500 pages to browse. The other gave me 4 pages. (She’s the one that became Project Manager when everyone jumped ship).
I verified the control breaks by the headings printed from Autocoder and checked the input file. It was sorted so it was merely writing a report and keeping track of totals. I had to run the missing report on my own but it was easy. So I coded it, tested it, tweaked the report format and implemented.

A few weeks later I got a call. The report wasn’t producing any output. So I went back. I checked the input files , yes there’s input. But no output. Well, after lunch I ran it again and there was output. Why, I didn’t know. The project leader wasn’t impressed. But since I had a few hours she asked me to help a co-op student. So I did. He’d inherited something and showed me what he was doing. I offered a few suggestions about corrections and asked for his specs. They were 1. Save this are. 2. Do this. 3. Restore this area.



Now the thing was he did 1. He did 2. But 3 was missing. And guess who’s program was called after that which ran with no data when 3 wasn’t done.
I was laughing. The project leader was relieved. He went into sales.