In 19 and 82 or 3, I worked at Lockheed Shipyard in Seattle, in a sort of tech writing capacity on a Navy ship building project, based on my recent experience in the Navy. The business closed with completion of the ships.

We had to fill out lots of forms that documented what we called "analysis," and we'd often have to change them based on some factor changing. One change could cascade through the whole form.

Paper forms. Green see-through plastic letter guides. Whiteout. Lots of whiteout.

We had access to a department mini computer, don't remember what it was. The language might have been Basic-like, but I didn't know enough to recognize it as such.

I figured out how to write and run programs, someone showed me how to print, and I wrote a program that would accept values for all a form's fundamental values, and cascade those through calculations for the dependent values, and print out the filled in form. You could save it, update a new value, re-cascade, and print it out again. No more whiteout.

Part of the calculation involved sorting. I didn't know anything about sorting, so I implemented what I later learned was bubble sort. Because that's obviously how you'd do that.

The system administer noticed more load when people ran my program. He found me, and told me not to do that again.

I learned that there was a thing called a system administrator. He might have given me a better canned sort, don't remember.

I eventually thought it would be a good idea to quit and go to school, so I did.

(I took a number theory class, but had to drop it. I don't have the math nature.)