[h2odragon]

Inherited an awful stack of hacks once; given a list of names it printed "hello my name is" badges on a dot matrix printer. In a big, friendly font. This was before PrintShop [1], some little single purpose app running on Victor 9000 "almost PC compatibles" under DOS 2.

The list came out of a COBOL "DBMS" system that had a 64kb table limit. They had more names to print than that.

The stack of hacks consisted of scripts that ran trough all the tables of the "members list" DB (multiple floppies were doable, by the time i got it they had a hard drive), creating text "dump" files of the bits that went to the printer; more scripts to assemble those dumps and reformat them (in GWBASIC), and finally a script that fed one record at a time through the pretty printer formatting program and printed it out.

My contribution was figuring out a way to feed the "pretty printer" multiple records per run; instead of invoking the chain once per record. saved days for the entire print run.

It was a horrible stack and it wasn't fun to work with and I cussed the people who had implemented it; however: given the constraints when it was built and the resources of the people using it; it was incredibly cool. Until I saw it I'd have said it wasn't possible with that collection of parts, but it functioned as required and did so for a decade. Eventually it was replaced with WordPerfect doing a mail merge operation; the people wearing the name badges complained that the font wasn't as pretty.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Print_Shop