My first long term programming job was writing COBOL code to replace some Autocoder programs. I think they were ashamed of the Autocoder stuff though. The only

My first long term programming job was writing COBOL code to replace some Autocoder programs. I think they were ashamed of the Autocoder stuff though. The only time I saw any of it was during final acceptance for the last program in the system. I couldn’t duplicate the output from the previous system. It was eventually traced to the fact that an object code patch had been applied to the old program, since they had stopped paying license fees for the compiler. This patch was documented by a hand-written note on the official program listings.