alt Hacker NewsStory time: I worked the night shift at a motel during college. "Bored to tears" was an understatement. I was poking around the front desk computer system one night, as one does, and found its data file. Lacking anything else to do, I wrote a little hex dumper in BASIC so I could explore the file. The first thing I noted was that customer names were spaced exactly N bytes apart. Oooh, fixed records! Then I spent the next week or so reverse engineering the DB file format. I'd twiddle a field in a random customer record then look at their record in the hex dump to see what changed, then update my notes.
Eventually I wrote another little BASIC program to run analytics, like which customers spent the most with us, and auto-fix mistyped names ("This says 'Bb Jones'. Did you mean 'Bob Jones'?") by writing directly to the file.
I got a pretty sweet little bonus for my hackery.
Replies
How did your program suggest auto-fixed names? A manually entered list of common names, or did it go by previous records?
BASIC is over 40 years older than me, and I have never played with it, thus my question :-)
I did something just like this at my first post-college job in the 90s. I found some weird backup files on the NT LAN, had similar observations as you, but wrote my extractor in C (casting records into structs - my first C program) using a “bcc” floppy disk. Turned out to be the entire insurance company Btrieve database, which I could dump into csv to load into MS Access.
This “database” allowed me to automate nearly my entire job - finding and exercising test cases for policy bug reports with a calculator - which gave me time to experiment with software development. I’d gone to college to be a writer, but this was waaaay cooler.
I didn’t get a bonus - heck I’d have been fired for sure - but that time spent learning made my entire career possible. Hoping to get another ten years before AI eats it all.