Once upon a time, there were computers made by IBM, Wang, and a few others that did nothing but word processing. They were massively expensive, and in the early 80's, were quickly killed off by the WordStar program running on the first wave of commercial desktop PC's.
I was contracted by a law firm to manage about a dozen temp workers to convert 1000s of Wang-formatted files to WordStar. Their IT people had us opening each Wang file with a conversion feature in WordStar, and then saving it. WordStar had to be opened and closed for each conversion. (The PCs got files from what was, essentially, a shared hard disk, but DOS and WordStar ran from floppy disks. I.e., it was all very slow.)
I spent my first few hours on the job figuring out what WordStar was doing. I discovered the conversion feature was a stand-alone program, and then worked out the syntax for feeding it a file. Then I built a batch file that would recursively convert entire directories. Needless to say, I was out of a crushingly dull job in a few days instead of a month or so.
I was contracted by a law firm to manage about a dozen temp workers to convert 1000s of Wang-formatted files to WordStar. Their IT people had us opening each Wang file with a conversion feature in WordStar, and then saving it. WordStar had to be opened and closed for each conversion. (The PCs got files from what was, essentially, a shared hard disk, but DOS and WordStar ran from floppy disks. I.e., it was all very slow.)
I spent my first few hours on the job figuring out what WordStar was doing. I discovered the conversion feature was a stand-alone program, and then worked out the syntax for feeding it a file. Then I built a batch file that would recursively convert entire directories. Needless to say, I was out of a crushingly dull job in a few days instead of a month or so.