It’s the early 1980s, and this young mainframe programmer pilot fish has a job at a big manufacturer — but not a lot of real-world data-processing experience.

“I was about as green as green gets,” fish admits. “But I was working as a Cobol programmer at a large company that had mainframe terminals scattered across the country.

“One day, after making changes in some code, I went to compile it. Halfway through, the mainframe crashed, hard. As soon as it came back up, I resubmitted my compile job and, as fate would have it, the mainframe crashed again at roughly the same point in the compile.

“Odd coincidence, I thought. I knew they had just completed upgrading the Cobol compiler to a new version, and I wondered if that might have something to do with the crashes, but I tried again.

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