It reminds my job as a technical support in a mainframe company. A software consultant was assigned to write a demonstation program to operate a third party passbook printer on the company's mainframe. He couldn't get the printer to do tasks like 'open chute' and 'skip lines' beyond printing. He claimed it was a technical issue and asked me to attend to. 'Escape code' was a basic key for printers. But the printer's handbook used octal code '033'. The software consultant couldn't tell the difference between octal and hex codes and treated it as decimal code. Having pointed him the way, he asked me to take up his assignment and wrote the program in Basic language. Upon my superior's agreement, I wrote the program in C language to challenge his coding capability. That was in the 80's when C language was just starting to gain popularity.
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