Flashback

There are a few cardboard boxes I haven't opened since I moved to my new house, which was over three years ago. They contain work stuff from the past. Notebooks, documents, media,?and papers. I was looking for some old notes that I knew were in there.

It was a sort of flashback.

While emptying the box searching, I found a print dump of something I wrote in 1993. I could not remember I had written something like that.

You find out you are old when you find your source code printed on old printer paper. I don't how many of you can remember that kind of printer paper. Dot matrix printers that used hole-punched paper with alternating colors for each line. Old stuff.

I forgot what I was looking for and started reading the content. I remembered when I wrote that piece of code in a few seconds.

One of our clients asked to customize their Unix System V computer default printer spooler. For some reason, they wanted to have the ability to give priority to some print jobs. This is a functionality that the default printer spooler did not offer out of the box. I wrote something like one thousand lines of bash script to mangle the print queue according to their specifications.?

I went through the source code, and I was surprised. Did I have this command of bash back in 1993? I read the print and confessed I did not understand some of the code. It took me some time to understand what was going on clearly.

I would not be able to do the job I was doing when I wrote that code.

It was a flashback.