[essayist]

I'm old enough to have been a timesharing programmer (when a 32k->64k working memory increase seemed like limitless abundance).

The company I worked for offered very expensive timesharing by the hour. Clients used an "Englishy" interpreted language to do economic forecasts, and client staff often programmed their own procedures.

My boss came to me one day to request that I speed up something a client had developed themselves, because it had become too expensive for them to run, and they were ready to bolt.

I had no desire to understand what their code did, and so treated the code mostly like a blackbox, and my job as speeding things up while leaving the transformation of inputs to particular outputs intact.

I had enough experience to know what the low hanging fruit were and went after those in the code. A day's work or so, and we got a 50-90% speed-up, enough to satisfy the client. I still don't really know what the code did. But I enjoyed the effort.