did anyone ever program in RPG?

[Don Shepherd]

I omitted one significant detail from the story above about working all weekend long to meet a schedule date.

When my coworker and I came in Monday morning after that long weekend, we discovered to our horror that the program(s) we had been modifying and testing all weekend had reverted to their version of Friday evening. ALL OF THE CHANGES WE MADE ON SATURDAY AND SUNDAY WERE LOST!!!

I went and found the systems guy and he said that, because of some anomaly, he had to restore the system (it was a VAX 11/780 as I recall) to its state as of Friday evening. He didn't know that we had worked all weekend, obviously. I was ready to kill, all that work down the drain. But then I remembered that we had hard copy code listings of all the changes we made, we just had to make them again Monday morning. I recall it took a couple of hours.

After that incident, I rarely threw away old code listings.