My first job as a teenager was writing Perl scripts for what I now realize was a phone marketing company. I would do things like process phone numbers and repla

My first job as a teenager was writing Perl scripts for what I now realize was a phone marketing company. I would do things like process phone numbers and replace area codes with newly added area codes depending on the other digits and process data from contacts to produce a list of phone numbers that the other employees would then call in order. I don’t recall much but I do know Perl was a joy for text processing, much easier than anything else I’ve used for that today. That was back when you needed the big oreilly books to lookup for to do things, before Google was useful for that.