I worked at a small insurance consulting firm in 1994. Before I got there someone did data entry into a spreadsheet but then sorted all the rows manually by inserting and copying and pasting. I read the Lotus 123 manual and showed them how to sort with different priorities. Their mind was blown. They had been spending hours sorting rows and the computer could do it in a minute (it was a slow machine)

Then they would take the spreadsheet data and dial in to a mainframe and type everything in again. This was a system at a different company. They wanted the spreadsheet version for their own local records. I found that the mainframe had a "file upload" feature and I figured out the format.

I installed Linux on another machine, added in some old ISA ethernet cards and had a network. I saved all files as Lotus 123 and .csv and wrote some Linux scripts to convert the data to the format the mainframe needed.

I also wrote some wrappers around "grep" to find anyone's info in the daily Lotus 123 update files.

All of this should have been done in a database but I had just finished my freshman year and didn't know anything about databases and the owner obviously didn't know much about computers in the first place.

Anyway I got a $500 bonus at the end of the summer and a glowing recommendation when I applied to some real software companies the next summer.