That's what we call 'competitive advantage'
It's the early days of home computers, and this utility company gets a fresh request to supply data to a government office, reports a pilot fish at the scene.
"I went on the new $20 million mainframe to extract the data," fish says. "After a lot of messing around, I realized the query could not be written to extract the data in the format they requested."
Fish doesn't want his company to miss the deadline, and he gets an idea. He generates a report and takes the data home to his own computer -- which boasts a whopping 48K of memory.
A little finagling in BASIC, and the report is in the right format. Then fish walks it back into work, dumps it into a file on the mainframe and prints it out.
"Our figures were checked and confirmed by the government office," says fish. "All the other companies failed to deliver the information, and we were phoned by every company afterwards asking how we did it. We never told them."
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