"Before my time someone had done a similar thing for an major application source that had no back up. They had to retype it from the latest listings. What was surprising was how many code bugs they found in the process."
Our junior programmer had just completed his first big program, and with the intention of printing out the finished listings the next day, threw his working printouts in the bin.
Then the source disk was discovered to be corrupt. All other sources were intact, but not his program's. That had him skip diving to retrieve his working printouts, to no avail. I did have a go at scavenging the empty spaces on disk, but couldn't find anything but snippets of his code.
Oh, well, he got to write his program again from scratch.
It was some years later that it occurred to me that he might have been covering up some unexplained cockup. We'll never know.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
