[war stories]

A grizzled old veteran used to tell me of his time with a computer on which running the compiler was prohibitively expensive, so development was done by producing binary patches against the executable, and then modifying the source code so it would hopefully generate code that did what the patched binary did. As if that were not bad enough, the machine was actually so feeble that running the text editor was prohibitively expensive, so developers would delay changing the source until their fix was tested, and then often "forget". Not too much of this and they ended up with a product that bore no relationship to its own source code.

This allegedly went on into the 1980s...

Peter