[lphillips0825]

Brings back fond memories. I was at JSC in Houston and took on a consulting job to convert a massive data manipulation and statistical analysis program that ran in COBOL on an IBM 370 to run on an IBM PC. I did a portion of the code in Turbo Pascal just for fun on a bet that it would run faster (in terms of user wait time) and it did—-45 minutes down to 5. Then I wrote the rest of the code, optimized, and got my first 80286-based PC and we got sub-minute processing times. At that point I convinced my friend that we could dispense with the collection of the massive data set via bubble scan sheets filled out in the field with an early laptop computer. We went through multiple iterations and improvements over a few years and the system ran for 15+ years, albeit on much improved hardware as time went on.