way too many, and can almost identify a similar experience in most of the "stories".

My best one is the programmer who's progam took 12 hours each night to run. One night ops didn't get it scheduled and started it at 6:00 a.m. Shut down effective company operations for the entire day (the response time was measured in minutes), on a IBM mainframe. Ops asked me to review code to see if it could be modified to run more efficiently. When I was done, the program took only 20 minutes, during the day, to run....

COBOL program. Without using actual code here's what was originally coded:

Open Updates File
Read Updates File
Do Until Updates EOF
...For x = 1 to 20
......Open Customer File
......Find Customer Record
......Update Field(X)
......Rewrite Customer Record
......Close Customer File
...Next X
...Read Update File
Loop
Close Updates File
Stop

And this was from programmer who was considered a good programmer!