After leaving school the first real job I had was as apprentice Television Engineer. At that time the Government were using stop/go tactics to speed up/slow down the economy. So, every time they slowed down by as an example putting two years deposit on hire purchase (a means of purchasing on credit) as last in first out I lost my job. I was never out of work prepared to do labouring, mend electric drills scaffolding and shop work to name a few. As soon as the jobs were available I returned to TV engineering. Why I tell this was that every job taught me something. Eventually I became the service manager at a local company and whilst there because we were told that we needed to learn about microprocessors as they would soon be in TV's and Video Recorders got interested in computers. Brought my first kit ( a British Nascom computer) built it in my kitchen and got hooked. Before long I wrote my first serious program a stock control application in Basic (Basic was on a 4k rom) using 5.1/4 floppy disks and 48k ram with cpm. I finally decided to leave that company and work for my self, buying shop premises and selling TV's Video Washing machines etc. I was offered to buy a computer business and took that over complete with staff. Along with the business, I purchased the good will and a number of clients who were on maintenance contracts. The employees had written an accounts program in CBasic running on Jarogate sprites using Multi User Dos of Barry Kildare fame. 8 meg of ram for 6 Wyse terminals.
We started to sell computers first the IBM PS2 model and then Taiwanese made compatibles. Was asked to write an application to manage parts from scrapped earth moving equipment. Decided to use Dbase I for the database work and assembly language to control the Wyse monitor, which was a portrait model with a board which would run in an IBM compatible. Worked how to take a scanned image in tiff format and uncompress it to send it byte by byte to the display board. If only I had copyrighted it as it was probably the forerunner of many parts managers today. I then saw an advert for FoxBASE and got hold of a trial copy which was so much faster and easier to use than Dbase. When FoxPro for DOS the 2.5 and 2.6 came out I upgrade each time and was never dissatisfied with my purchase. I was then asked to modernise the Accounts program to run under Windows which meant moving to FoxPro for Windows then VFP 3. Soon got other work writing applications of all varieties which has meant buying upgrades through 5 6 7 8 and eventually 9. I am now 67 but still working, but when working with FoxPro I feel good about myself and I am so glad I asked for that trial copy of FoxBASE. Anyway your only as old as the woman you feel and mine to me is young and beautiful. Cheers Peter Peter Hart Computers. _______________________________________________ Post Messages to: [email protected] Subscription Maintenance: http://leafe.com/mailman/listinfo/profox OT-free version of this list: http://leafe.com/mailman/listinfo/profoxtech Searchable Archive: http://leafe.com/archives/search/profox This message: http://leafe.com/archives/byMID/profox/a57fa4cf19531343a2ee11b57db8e3af100...@server.peterhartcomputers.local ** All postings, unless explicitly stated otherwise, are the opinions of the author, and do not constitute legal or medical advice. This statement is added to the messages for those lawyers who are too stupid to see the obvious.
