(c.1986) Telephone company accounting system with System/38 (pre AS/400) and System R (early SQL), CL+RPGIII. The call rating process required half a dozen look

(c.1986) Telephone company accounting system with System/38 (pre AS/400) and System R (early SQL), CL+RPGIII. The call rating process required half a dozen lookups to other tables to complete each record in a batch. Something that would be well handled by a modern join. But at the time the vendor was like, "Gee Ma it works! Ship it." Compiled RPG III was lightning fast and a lot like working in assembly with fixed/prealloc string handling. I made a template and adapted it for each table that cached recent lookups for each. 6x improvement. Then realized that since records were autonomous and batches run and posted separately, it was never necessary to process calls in chrono order. Pre-indexing on destination number resulted in cache hits almost all the time and 10x speed improvement over the 6x. When I asked my Dad how long something took, he'd say something like "2 years and 20 minutes." 2 years to get around to it. Mom took his habit into the real world and published an ad for the company with a cut out "Round Tuit" and copy, "How many times have you heard someone say, 'I'll do that when I get a round tuit.' Now that you have your very own Round Tuit, there's no limit to what you can accomplish!" Round Tuits were cut out and appeared on walls all over town.