Martin Steigerwald said on Tue, 19 Dec 2023 10:14:31 +0100

>Steve Litt - 19.12.23, 01:29:53 CET:
>> >I have also been paid to program Amiga's.
>>
>> My first paid programming gig was on an Apple 2. I got $50 to
>> eliminate an error message.
>
>Now that is a nice easy job, just remove a print statement somewhere
>and the error message is gone. Hey, why are you complaining? "You said
>remove the error message, not the error". Muhahaha.
>
>(You probably removed the cause of the error as well, maybe. :) )

That's not quite how it happened. He hired me, for $50.00, to fix the
problem, not eliminate the error message. The trouble was, the clown
that wrote the program, in some sort of BASIC no less, in several
places instead of declaring and using variables, he used Peek and Poke
to store things in specific memory locations. These were global
variables, by the way, not arguments passed in or function returns
passed back out.

Back then (1983) I was so new at programming that I felt ashamed of not
being able to trace the problem through these RAM pinholes. After two or
three hours trying to find the root cause I gave up. I went to the
customer and said the following:

"I can't find the cause of your error message. Besides this error
message, do you have any reason to believe something's wrong with
the program? Any wrong results or other malfunctions?"

He said "No", so I continued:

"If you want, I can just disable the message itself for fifty dollars
and you won't be bothered by it anymore. Otherwise I'll leave it your
program as is, and not ask for the fifty dollars."

He said he preferred to pay me fifty dollars to eliminate the error
message, so that's what he did.

Less than six months later I got my first real programming job with a
real salary.

Ahhh, youth!

SteveT

Steve Litt

Autumn 2023 featured book: Rapid Learning for the 21st Century
http://www.troubleshooters.com/rl21