[faoileag]

Working as a test automation engineer in '91/92 (although as an intern), I wrote a program that controlled a test rig for seat belts.

The machine was basically a home computer running a repl with BASIC, beefed up with a handful of input/output ports to get data from sensors and operate pneumatic actors on the rig.

No graphics beyond what you could do with ASCII on a monochrome monitor.

In the end it came to ~2800 lines of code including comments.

Design principles: a) make it work and b) make the code as readable as possible.

Work-life-balance: it was a normal engineering job, so basically a 9-to-5 thing. Although I did put in a saturday appearance at the end to get everything done (including manuals) before my stint ended.

All-in-all it was as much fun as one could have in test automation at the time; writing the program from scratch and adapting the rig where necessary.