Intern Had No Idea What Not To Do, So Nearly Mangled A Mainframe
The Register, Monday, September 29th, 2025
An early career lesson in the power of documentation, and the importance of exploration
This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Benedict" who shared the story of the summer internship he endured many years ago.
"I worked at a big corporation running on mainframes, in the stone age when using a computer meant writing jobs on punched cards and submitting them to be executed," Benedict reminisced. "Our usual job involved working on source files with a batch editor which interleaved commands to skip, modify, insert, and delete new lines into our program."
Then as now, interns tried to impress their temporary employers in the hope of landing a job offer.