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Story time: I worked the night shift at a motel during college. "Bored to tears" was an understatement. I was poking around the front desk computer system one night, as one does, and found its data file. Lacking anything else to do, I wrote a little hex dumper in BASIC so I could explore the file. The first thing I noted was that customer names were spaced exactly N bytes apart. Oooh, fixed records! Then I spent the next week or so reverse engineering the DB file format. I'd twiddle a field in a random customer record then look at their record in the hex dump to see what changed, then update my notes. Eventually I wrote another little BASIC program to run analytics, like which customers spent the most with us, and auto-fix mistyped names ("This says 'Bb Jones'. Did you mean 'Bob Jones'?") by writing directly to the file. I got a pretty sweet little bonus for my hackery.
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I did something just like this at my first post-college job in the 90s. I found some weird backup files on the NT LAN, had similar observations as you, but wrote my extractor in C (casting records into structs - my first C program) using a “bcc” floppy disk. Turned out to be the entire insurance company Btrieve database, which I could dump into csv to load into MS Access. 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.
All was fun... sorry (about two decades younger) when I was a junior web designer in the late 90s, keyword designer, not coder, I got approached with a freelance job to build an online store, which I knew nothing about doing. I knew some PHP, mainly how to write stuff in and out of files and inline variables into html. Naturally, I said yes to the job even though I was totally unqualified. I mean, who was qualified? I had to build a whole login portal from scratch for them to upload products, and images of the products, and sub-sub-products, and add-ons and prices and descriptions, and then have all of that reflect on the public website where people would buy them by adding them to a shopping cart which was basically a very long GET query that kept getting added to. So but words like "database" and "sql" scared the shit out of me at the time. I was doing most of my coding out of a starbucks in Eagle Rock and there was one other guy there on a laptop, John P, who kept looking at what I was writing and telling me I had to learn databases. What I ended up coding was basically a database based on text files and pages and a custom encoding methods and a system for locking. Imagine a year later in 1999 when I realized this had all been solved and I'd been too stubborn to try it or understand what it did... Fast forward a few years and someone put two sequential asterisks in in the name of a product and blew up the site and my encoding system, since they'd accidentally stumbled on the row break symbol. lol. Good times.
How did your program suggest auto-fixed names? A manually entered list of common names, or did it go by previous records? BASIC is over 40 years older than me, and I have never played with it, thus my question :-)