3 ms·

I worked as a hotel night auditor during college. It was great for me: I did actual work from around 11PM to midnight, then loafed around until around 6AM when

I worked as a hotel night auditor during college. It was great for me: I did actual work from around 11PM to midnight, then loafed around until around 6AM when it was time to set up the breakfast table. A big chunk of my job was doing tedious manual edits in the guest management software that tracked who was in what room, what phone and pay-per-view charges they'd racked up, etc. It occurred to me to peek at its database file and see if I could pull any useful data out with automation. The DB turned out to be a flat file of fixed-length records. The DOS PC had a copy of QBasic on it and I used a bunch of trial and error to map those records to types, and then I could loop across the records to get interesting data out of them. Long story short, I ended up with a system we'd run nightly to correct misspellings, build reports of which companies did the most business with us and how recently, identify regular guests who hadn't been around in a while, and a thousand other little things that made my job much more pleasant and my boss extremely happy. It would be much easier to recreate that program today in a nicer language. I didn't have a nicer language available, though, and while it wasn't pretty, QBasic got the job done.

chasil 3y ago
The AWK Programming Language was published in 1988, and indicates: "Aside from these limitations, however, awk should be useful in any environment; in particular, it runs on MS-DOS. Further information is available from Addison-Wesley." It likely was not easy to find, and I hadn't heard of it until 1990.
- johannes1234321 3y ago
  In a pre Internet time a lot harder to learn about, fetch and learn than QBAsic, which was saprt of DOS and had a quite good online help system. Many alternatives existed, but non that were so approachable on DOS (and many other systems in their variant)
- kstrauser 3y ago
  There's zero chance I personally would have been capable of building that same software in Awk, even if I knew of it, and even if I knew how to get it onto that non-networked computer that didn't have any removable media in common with what I had at home.

chasil 3y ago

The AWK Programming Language was published in 1988, and indicates: "Aside from these limitations, however, awk should be useful in any environment; in particular, it runs on MS-DOS. Further information is available from Addison-Wesley." It likely was not easy to find, and I hadn't heard of it until 1990.

johannes1234321 3y ago
In a pre Internet time a lot harder to learn about, fetch and learn than QBAsic, which was saprt of DOS and had a quite good online help system. Many alternatives existed, but non that were so approachable on DOS (and many other systems in their variant)
kstrauser 3y ago
There's zero chance I personally would have been capable of building that same software in Awk, even if I knew of it, and even if I knew how to get it onto that non-networked computer that didn't have any removable media in common with what I had at home.