> Plus lots of contracting in the 80s for people who needed data (send back and forth on floppies) converted from one accounting system to another.
When I was sixteen or seventeen, I worked as a summer intern in the IT department of a local utility company. They gave me this data conversion task that they expected me to complete manually on a timescale of roughly the entire summer.
It took about two days before I just automated the whole thing with a Turbo Pascal 6 program and had the task completed in something like a week. The biggest part of the challenge by that point was moving around a large volume of data (~100MB) on the 1.44MB floppies common at the time. (I remember ARJ helping immensely, between it's multi-disk support and the high compressibility of the data.)
My unexpectedly high output on this task served me well.
