This “database” allowed me to automate nearly my entire job - finding and exercising test cases for policy bug reports with a calculator - which gave me time to experiment with software development. I’d gone to college to be a writer, but this was waaaay cooler.
I didn’t get a bonus - heck I’d have been fired for sure - but that time spent learning made my entire career possible. Hoping to get another ten years before AI eats it all.
BASIC is over 40 years older than me, and I have never played with it, thus my question :-)
It went by previous records. I'd read something about Levenshtein distance somewhere, and implemented my own half-assed version of it that was surely slower, more complicated, and less accurate. It still got the job done, though. I showed it to a coworker, who described it as "magic", and I floated on that compliment for a long time after.
I was pretty proud of it, although the resulting QBasic code was pretty awful in retrospect. It was probably my first commercial-scale project, built with the software that happened to ship with the computer.