Re: The Story of Mal ...
My 3rd ever real life programming assignment was to take an old ca 1975 PL/1 program and basically rewrite it was written in the organisations - 'standards yeah we've heard of them' phase - no proper loops , all GOTOs, no functions or procedures, all GOTOs. It was the 'side job' I was given whilst waiting for the compiles and test runs of my 2nd, 4th and 5th real life programming assignments.
My first was the one and only time I used coding sheets and punched cards, I had almost finished that work, when 3270 terminals were rolled out, great excitement when my last run was submitted from my desk, rather than trekking down to the computer room with my deck.
Six months or so later, after the company dropped the word 'trainee' and added analyst/' to my title, I was put into the "maintenance team", it would not be unusual for me to come into work and find a program listing and core dump on my desk with a big note left by my team leader if they had been oncall - "job failed for account zzzzzzzz. removed account from batch, rest of batch executed ok - original batch file is at yyyyyy, - Fix before going on with anything else."