 IBM 360/65 mainframe Credit: John Sloan |
I worked in a wide variety of development environments as an independent contractor in Washington DC, mostly on small teams or individual assignments, but I’ve found there’s an incredible wealth of learning opportunities that come with working in the large-team environment we have at the Coast Guard. In addition to having a wide variety of perspectives and solutions coming from my coworkers, I also get to hear some great tales from the early days of computing.
Our DBA is in his 50s, and one day he related to me the most expensive programming mistake of his career. This was in the 70s, and computers were still too expensive for most companies, so his employer leased processing time on a mainframe computer at General Electric.
 Punchcard with Map Data Credit: bootload |
Because of memory constraints, programmers in these days had to work off of print-outs of their code, writing out their programming changes on paper, and then modifying the specific lines of code through a terminal. Once a program was ready for testing, it was sent to General Electric’s central computer for processing, and the company was billed for the time required to run the program.
While working as a programmer in this environment, our DBA had sent his code to General Electric’s central computer for processing. Knowing that the code still required a great deal of debugging, he decided to go to lunch, expecting the program to error out in a few minutes.
Upon coming back from lunch an hour later, he found his program still running. He immediately canceled the request, and, after reviewing his code, found a bug that created an infinite loop. Thus the program never stopped processing.
Although he never was reprimanded for it, this little programming mistake cost his company more than $10,000 1970s U.S. Dollars.
Further Reading: 50 Years of Conventional Wisdom and Eye-raising Anecdotes from Programming Veterans