As a young “Business Analyst” (1990s QA), when a defect was reported at Insurance Co, we had to make some guesses about what might be wrong and request a “scan”

As a young “Business Analyst” (1990s QA), when a defect was reported at Insurance Co, we had to make some guesses about what might be wrong and request a “scan” from the COBOL programmers, which returned output in the form of green-paper printouts of dozens of insurance policies with similar attributes with some policy values - this took about a week. I would then have to go through each line, pull out a physical rate tables book, and calculate what the policy values should be, going back and forth to a CICS 3270 terminal to get data for calculations and check stuff. If I found enough other policies with the same defect, I could either narrow down for a second scan or report the problem if I was confident. As a new liberal arts college grad who wrote in basic on the 486, and knew everything, this was NONSENSE. Network Security didn’t exist here, and neither did internet access. I found code for a Win32 netbios share scanner on some forum (Code-Something iirc), and smuggled it in on a CD with Borlands free C compiler to load on my Windows95 PC. Looking through every file in the building was how I spent free time that summer. One day I came across some huge binary files that looked important, which ended up being the Btrieve database daily backups (*.btr). They were fixed record binary encoded in some EBCDIC text thing (this took me a month to figure out) and I was able to write a small C program to dump them to CSV, which I imported into MSAccess and learned SQL in the process (and C, I guess). Not only did I never need a scan again, but never needed to access the terminal and could write VBA to perform math. Instead of doing the mindless old process, I spent my time typing rate sheets into excel and completely automating my job. Of course I never told anyone. My next job was junior developer, somewhere else. I never did find any of the system code on that network, only some Delphi tooling. The programmers at least were security-minded.