It was actually an underlying tokenized bytecode (double-byte code?) never intended for human manipulation. Before I joined the group, other programmers had dis

It was actually an underlying tokenized bytecode (double-byte code?) never intended for human manipulation. Before I joined the group, other programmers had discovered it, reverse engineered it, and began patching it. The attitude required to do that was not uncommon in mainframe shops, where the original IBM assembler or COBOL source code for many crucial production jobs was long lost; patching the object code was accepted practice. That is part of the reason why Y2K was a bugbear for banks; they didn't only recall COBOL programmers out of retirement---in some cases it required patching the binaries.