Chronology of a Geeks career - a 42+ year journey with Technology
(updated 2023)
I've had a long and interesting kind of 'evolutional' technology based career of which I have many opinions.
For you others who have had similar you will find it interesting to read, however if you are still challenged by your FX82 calculator - you will most certainly fall asleep.
More than being about computers, I thought I would write a section on my own personal history of computers and technology.
It is a bit of a story of technical evolution if you will.
It all started on a dark and stormy night ...
Actually it was sometime during 1981 or 1982. My dad bought a ZX81 home computer for use with his business. I was about 12 years old - and this looked like a great toy.
(Yes, thats correct - I was a geek - back when it both was uncool to be a geek, and also when they weren't paid well)
I managed to get into this thing (the ZX81 to be clear) and have a play around with it, Back in those days we used to get programs from magazines (popular mechanics and Bits and Bytes Magazine etc) from the UK.
Many of the editions had coding errors in them and you had to wait a month for the next edition to be published with the fixed software.
I spent many long nights keying in hexadecimal pairs by the thousand - literally).
1981 - ZX81
A funny little computer, awesome and best way to learn basic.
Also the best way to learn how to program efficiently.
With a massive 1k of RAM (yes folk's that's a K not an M or a G) on board total, you had only 1000 characters to write your entire program in. I think it had about 8K of ROM which managed the entire system - so your 1K was really YOUR 1K and not the systems :-)
I recall the magazine having a competition to see who could write the best application with one line of code (on the ZX81 you could label and nest goto in a single line, so effectively one line of code could be an entire application). One guy wrote a ZX81 equivalent of the popular Atari game Defender in one line of code in using the 1KB of RAM!
It was as ugly as hell - but it actually worked - a well deserved win !
Actually when I was researching for this blog I found this funny link which demonstrates what we were dealing with in this era.
Sinclair Basic was ahead of its time, allowing PEEK and POKE directly to the chip etc. No Colour, No Monitor, Very chunky Graphics, No Sound not even an on/off switch (which we added later)
The computer is composed of only four IC chips, and there are no video chips or co-processors. The CPU has to perform all of the tasks that are required of a computer, which means it executes the BASIC program and updates the screen at the same time, slowing the program speed. The fix in the Sinclair world?
Answer : Don't update the display as often - the SLOW and FAST commands determine the video display rate. The FAST command allows the program to run 4X faster, but then the display gets jerky.
I really only wrote simple games and played with this computer, spending many hours and much of my school study time learning how to program. A huge benefit in hindsight as I built my career upon this little machine.
Dad being and electronics nut, decided to build his own 16k Extended RAM pack. We did this with chips bought from David Reid Electronics and it worked really well.
Looking back - that was pretty impressive - I think he still has it.
Besides, we would NEVER fill 16K of RAM !!!!
1982 - Sinclair ZX Spectrum
Wow colour!!, and high res, with beep sounds ! - this just gets better
Here is a good Spectrum song which I can relate to with my background - big time !
Horace goes skiing?
1983 - Commodore 64
Yes here it is - the very first real BLUE SCREEN :-)
The command shown on the screen if I remember rightly is basically load the first thing from the disk drive (being '8'), I think '1' mean't tape drive. I cant recall now.
My dad and I were heavily involved in forming and attending the Waikato Commodore Computers User Group - one of the very early and first geek-fests in NZ. These were good technical meetings as they really turned into pirate and hacker meets.
I recall getting home after each club meeting and comparing with Dad to see who had managed to 'swap' the most software - and thus we built a huge library of software, tips, games, images - whatever - if it was digital - we gobbled it al up !
We used a music tape drive initially to store and save our software and programs (similar to what we did with the ZX81, except Commodore had thier own).
Eventually we got a 1541 (OMG I can still recall the model) floppy disk drive.
Amazingly I can't recall my wife's birthday, but I still remember setting the screen colours at 53281 and 53280 and locking users out of their keyboards while my software ran by using (poking) chip address 646 (I think??).
I recall the Commodore64 was our first computer which had a COM / RS232 port - which meant you could 'plug things in' or 'control things' - that was it - from here would could hack the US military or contact another planet - the possibilities were now endless - ET get on ya bike !
About this time the Apple II was making itself felt in schools. At Melville High School our 'computer room' had a couple of Polys (see the black and white picture of one).
The Poly was a home/educational computer platform developed in NZ in the early 1980s. It was marketed to schools, but because it was prohibitively expensive and somewhat idiosyncratic, the main customers seem to have been the Australian Army and somebody in China.
Perhaps its most remarkable feature was its ability for networking, which seems to have used a protocol all of its own. For a year or two it may have been the most network capable home computer in the world, before 3Com thought to make Ethernet cards for the Apple II.
It was actually named after Wellington Polytechnic, where it was developed.
As I had written code before I and only one or two others at school were able to make it do some cool graphics - remember those string pictures?? That sort of thing.
Back at home on our Commodore, we'll ... we did have some fun with the modem, mainly we got into BBS's or Bulletin Board Services. With our 300 baud rate modem these were great sources of information. I got very good an ANSI code screen building with these.
We had a Compuserve account among others as I recall.
These BBS would later become the foundational idea called the Internet - but that was still many years away yet!
1985 - Commodore 128D
Now frankly, this computer was just bizarre.
Start it and it started as a 128, hold down the commodore key and start it and it was a full functioning Commodore 64, another key and it booted up with CP/M
CP/M gave me a 'peek' (excuse the pun) into the 'DOS-like' world outside of basic and assembly language.
1985 - 1986 Superbase
Using Superbase I developed a software application for tradespeople to quote and manage workloads. This won me first prize in the Houston Computers (Hamilton) software developers competition.
Debt Collection database (using Superbase)
More content on this project to follow when I get some time
I cannot recall the year exactly, but around about this time - while working for an Industrial Electrical focussed company (IEC) in Hamilton (NZ), I was contracted to write a piece of software for the New Zealand Diary Company. An interesting piece of code which reported on the weight being placed on any given conveyor belt (butter, cheese etc), so they could more effectively manage the replacement and lifecycle of conveyor belts (which they had thousands). While working there I also did some small projects on PLC’s. One in particular was to manage and operate a disability lift at Waikato University.
I got about 95 precent of the way through my Certificate in Computing and Advanced Cert in Computing, when the stuff I was learning became obsolete before I completed it – such was the ability in those days for academia to keep up with rapid advances in technology.
Around about this time I worked for a period of time for Whitcoulls (you know them 'more than a book store'!). I worked in the Computers and Calculators department. Here I actually learned to program using HP, Casios as others. I became quite skilled at reverse polish notation (RPN) at the time !
It was also here I learned to program using Bee'b's - remember those BBC's. BBC basic
yep - thats just Fugly isn't it !! - I would have killed to own my own one back then. They had very cool high res graphics on them.
It was actually named after Wellington Polytechnic, where it was developed.
As I had written code before I and only one or two others at school were able to make it do some cool graphics - remember those string pictures?? That sort of thing.
Back at home on our Commodore, we'll ... we did have some fun with the modem, mainly we got into BBS's or Bulletin Board Services. With our 300 baud rate modem these were great sources of information. I got very good an ANSI code screen building with these.
We had a Compuserve account among others as I recall.
These BBS would later become the foundational idea called the Internet - but that was still many years away yet!
1985 - Commodore 128D
Now frankly, this computer was just bizarre.
Start it and it started as a 128, hold down the commodore key and start it and it was a full functioning Commodore 64, another key and it booted up with CP/M
CP/M gave me a 'peek' (excuse the pun) into the 'DOS-like' world outside of basic and assembly language.
I guess it was a bit of a Linux (before its time) / DOS hybrid.
I ended up using a lot of 128D's, Superbase (see below), VMD 312 (Fountain) and Hayes smartmodems (300 baud) to build an online inventory management system for Parker Hardley Merchants Plumbing (later acquired by Plumbing World (NZ).
When I built this solution in 1986 it was bleeding edge and worked very well, at the time I understood we were the only company to have achieved it (or even though of it)
On the counter trade purchases were batch relayed to head office and purchasing requirements for the whole of business were managed from this data.
Sales records, Analysis and billing were also done.
Sales records, Analysis and billing were also done.
Not bad for 1986, an 18(ish) year old kid, and a string of home computers and super slow modems.
At PHM I also worked on a Burroughs B20 (it ran our payroll, and had a punch card reader for storage). I recall it had the amazing Intel 8086 or 8088 family of 8-bit chips as the processor.
I didn't know much about it really, and fixed a couple of minor things - but it was different technology to what I was used to - it was also quite old and going out with the ark.
I still recall the old lady in the office guarding this jealously as I moved in with my fleet of shiny Commodore 128D's !
At PHM I also worked on a Burroughs B20 (it ran our payroll, and had a punch card reader for storage). I recall it had the amazing Intel 8086 or 8088 family of 8-bit chips as the processor.
I didn't know much about it really, and fixed a couple of minor things - but it was different technology to what I was used to - it was also quite old and going out with the ark.
I still recall the old lady in the office guarding this jealously as I moved in with my fleet of shiny Commodore 128D's !
As above, this was my first real foray into what a 'database' actually was.
This changed my thinking from Games software development and opened the realisation of the value and contribution computers would add to business by means of databases.
This changed my thinking from Games software development and opened the realisation of the value and contribution computers would add to business by means of databases.
I still recall around this time talking with several people who had never heard the term 'database'.
I actually knew of one manager who had a computer on his desk which was never plugged in - just for image - those were funny days.
I actually knew of one manager who had a computer on his desk which was never plugged in - just for image - those were funny days.
Using Superbase I developed a software application for tradespeople to quote and manage workloads. This won me first prize in the Houston Computers (Hamilton) software developers competition.
Debt Collection database (using Superbase)
More content on this project to follow when I get some time
I cannot recall the year exactly, but around about this time - while working for an Industrial Electrical focussed company (IEC) in Hamilton (NZ), I was contracted to write a piece of software for the New Zealand Diary Company. An interesting piece of code which reported on the weight being placed on any given conveyor belt (butter, cheese etc), so they could more effectively manage the replacement and lifecycle of conveyor belts (which they had thousands). While working there I also did some small projects on PLC’s. One in particular was to manage and operate a disability lift at Waikato University.
I got about 95 precent of the way through my Certificate in Computing and Advanced Cert in Computing, when the stuff I was learning became obsolete before I completed it – such was the ability in those days for academia to keep up with rapid advances in technology.
Around about this time I worked for a period of time for Whitcoulls (you know them 'more than a book store'!). I worked in the Computers and Calculators department. Here I actually learned to program using HP, Casios as others. I became quite skilled at reverse polish notation (RPN) at the time !
It was also here I learned to program using Bee'b's - remember those BBC's. BBC basic
yep - thats just Fugly isn't it !! - I would have killed to own my own one back then. They had very cool high res graphics on them.
IBM and DOS
... during this time I also started to play with IBM clone based machines and spotted a similar database management system called Dbase, which soon led me to Foxbase (which strangely ran Dbase code quicker than Dbase itself)
From memory I started with DOS version 2.0 on IBM clones. Writing .BAT (batch files) and long complex strings of them to capture screen input and move files and masses of data about - often on Novel Networks, and over X25 WAN.
1987 - Dbase III
During 1987 I wrote a huge stocktaking application for a company I worked for, it printed many many pages of dot matrix paper output on a regular basis - in fact by the box full ... and basically depleted all of the forests from South America. They are only now making a comeback.
Back then it was cool to be non-green :-)
You can see how similar the 'environment' was to Dbase above. Microsoft later purchased Fox Software to the outrage of millions of developers worldwide.
Fox had a huge comminity base of developers worldwide. There were even international Foxpro conventions.
1989 - 1994 - Foxpro (I developed in all the versions v1.0 though to 2.6)
Here they are in reverse order. (Note, I did not use the Mac or Unix versions)
FPW 2.6a FoxPro 2.6a for Windows 28 September 1994
FPM 2.6a FoxPro 2.6a for Macintosh August 1994
FPD 2.6a FoxPro 2.6a for DOS August 1994
FPW 2.6 FoxPro 2.6 for Windows 9 March 1994
FPM 2.6 FoxPro 2.6 for Macintosh 1993
FPD 2.6 FoxPro 2.6 for DOS March 1994
FPW 2.5 FoxPro 2.5 for Windows January 1993
FPD 2.5 FoxPro 2.5 for DOS February 1993
FPD 2.0 FoxPro 2.0 for DOS 1991
FPD 1.0 FoxPro 1.0 for DOS 1989
I also acted as a sole technical support guru for other Foxpro developers in NZ (as Microsoft did not have any dedicated resource at the time), and I was even recognised in a formal letter from Microsoft in Redmond, USA for this. I had also submitted several 'whitepapers' to the Microsoft Developer forum around VFP technical issues.
Geac Computer Corporation (Canada bought HCS at this time), now I was working for one very big machine.
With this application I had built (called Mosaic) you could graphically draw the event rooms and the software would manage catering, seating, layout, equipment, access, bookings, finance and any other aspects for an entire centre.
It was used by Waipuna International Conference Centre for their event management.
Being Windows based (by then Foxpro was in a Windows Shell - v2.5w) it was a real hit - and very bleeding edge.
Hotelier Five Star as I understand it, got canned primarily as a result of the Y2K fiasco - the clients were badly let down and left out in the cold from my recollection.
Sure, the technology was old, and granted it was very date dependant application - but did it have Y2K issues? - most programmers at the time thought not so - the point is the company did not even check - Hotels were simply not their focus going forward.
August 1999, 43 hotels received a letter saying there would be no further technical or business support for Hotelier Five Star from Sept 1999. End.
Soon after I worked for a company which managed and processed large data and print volumes. Managing all the data and mail processing for Readers Digest, a number of power companies, United Videos loyalty card systems etc.
On top of these I was charged with developing a system to manage all of the end to end processes around the NZ Heart Foundations lottery system. This was a huge development project. I built the system which mailed out the trickets, checked the validity and auditing, drew the winners and managed all the associated finances and balancing for the charity. It was a huge success for marketing Data Systems at the time. This contract became their core bread and butter business eventually.
Later I worked for a Melbourne based company (I was based in Auckland), and let the development of a very complex payroll system. It was complex in that any one customer who needed to use it, essentially required each user to see and use different screens and terminology. For example, a user in Sydney may call the Last name a Lastname, another in Perth my use the term Surname, or Secondname. There were infinite combinations of all the fields the system had to manage.
So, I designed a database which held this huge matrix of information, using network API's it knew who had logged on, and build screen and validation code customised to their needs on the fly. It then compiled it and ran it for the user instantly without the user even needed to know - this was a very cool application.
Every aspect could be customised to every user, the position and colour of a field on the screen for example. This was a Foxpro front end to a mainframe back end. It is now days most closely termed a 'data driven' application.
The application was used as the core payroll system at the time for Coles and David Jones chains.
During this time Visual Basic was making a growth spurt under Microsoft and the common database system to use was now largely MS Access or SQl Server. These were painful though as you needed to configure and maintain ODBC links, buffering, transactional rollbacks, offline recordsets etc.
To me it was flexible - but messy and disjointed, and it all needed so much code.
It certainly required a lot more code to do simple things like move the record pointer around and build recordsets.
I did some work in this space for a number of companies - but it was not my favourite that's for sure.
Most people around this time who really 'knew their salt' were preferring Foxpro or SQL Server. Later MS Access became the bain of every business, as every man and his dog had a personal unsupported Access DB and associated processes hiding under their desk.
In my career I have done many a job, ripping out Access and rebuilding with SQL. In that sense I made good money from MS Access I suppose you could say. As a closing note - It is a fact worth considering that not until MS Access 2007 (using ACCDB) was released - was it accepted as being technically stable with reasonable dataset sizes and speeds.
1996 - Sybase - SQL Server
More to follow
1999 - Wang (NZ)
Exposure here to SQL Server
It was called Sybase originally. It was later sold to Microsoft (after all - wasn't everything !?) - I didn't really get my teeth into it until I worked for Gen-i (version 6.5).
Wang later changed its name and traded as gen-i, which eventually got purchased by Telecom. While at Wang I worked in Knowledge solutions specialising in imaging, scanning and document management systems such as Filenet, Trim and the like.
... during this time I also started to play with IBM clone based machines and spotted a similar database management system called Dbase, which soon led me to Foxbase (which strangely ran Dbase code quicker than Dbase itself)
From memory I started with DOS version 2.0 on IBM clones. Writing .BAT (batch files) and long complex strings of them to capture screen input and move files and masses of data about - often on Novel Networks, and over X25 WAN.
1987 - Dbase III
Yes - the infamous 'dot' prompt. See the screen shot below for what this typically looked like. You always had the record pointer visible (on the 'status bar') so you knew where in the database you were working.
A move to object orientated code - mind set change
This introduced me to SQL (Structured Query Language), something I was to use extensively in my development career.
During 1987 I wrote a huge stocktaking application for a company I worked for, it printed many many pages of dot matrix paper output on a regular basis - in fact by the box full ... and basically depleted all of the forests from South America. They are only now making a comeback.
Back then it was cool to be non-green :-)
1988 - Foxbase
Foxbase was near idebntical to Dbase in all aspects really. It could actuyally run raw Dbase code (completely unchanmged) faster than Dbase could itself
You can see how similar the 'environment' was to Dbase above. Microsoft later purchased Fox Software to the outrage of millions of developers worldwide.
Fox had a huge comminity base of developers worldwide. There were even international Foxpro conventions.
1989 - 1994 - Foxpro (I developed in all the versions v1.0 though to 2.6)
Here they are in reverse order. (Note, I did not use the Mac or Unix versions)
FPW 2.6a FoxPro 2.6a for Windows 28 September 1994
FPM 2.6a FoxPro 2.6a for Macintosh August 1994
FPD 2.6a FoxPro 2.6a for DOS August 1994
FPW 2.6 FoxPro 2.6 for Windows 9 March 1994
FPM 2.6 FoxPro 2.6 for Macintosh 1993
FPD 2.6 FoxPro 2.6 for DOS March 1994
FPW 2.5 FoxPro 2.5 for Windows January 1993
FPD 2.5 FoxPro 2.5 for DOS February 1993
FPD 2.0 FoxPro 2.0 for DOS 1991
FPD 1.0 FoxPro 1.0 for DOS 1989
In the early 90's I got a job working for my first IT company as it were.
Hotel Computer Systems specialised in Reservation IT systems for Hotel chains (one was Quality Hotels). I worked on Sales Database Analysis (Foxpro based) with their chain of hotels and a number of independents. This system managed a loyalty based program.
Hotelier Five Star was the main software application from HCS.
The code was rumoured to have been written over a period of over 15 years, but hundreds of developers I too added by pieces of code. This was written in GW-Basic and used low level text-based data to store info in tables.
GW-Basic was around in the mid 80's and peaked about 1985. By the early 90's it was well past its use-by date - and this application was pushing the limits big time.
It was based on an earlier version of Microsoft Basic (of Bill Gates fame). Later it became Qbasic - which some know of as Quickbasic.
In GW Basic, I remember spending hours moving out comments and abbreviating text to find a few more bytes to add the smallest line of code (we had maxed out the number of bytes of code which GW basic could handle).
Those were trying days - and at the time some of the biggest hotels in the country depended on it. The 'goto' and 'gosub' nesting was horrendous.
I also remember version upgrades to the underlying basic, needing video card upgrades as a result (CGA - VGA?), which in turn conflicted with the Netware cards and brought the whole thing down - oh the memories!
I have a recollection of 80+ people waiting to checkout and get on their tourist buses (two of them full) in Christchurch (the hotel will remain nameless), the the computer server had just crashed and erased all the data. That day I was training a new guy - it was his first day. We did 48 hours with no sleep or food trying to get it all going again - then he quit that same week. We had to 'engineer' a fictitious account - to get everyone through.
Here I was also a key player in the support team often flying all round the country to bring back to life dead Novell Netware servers. I got a good appreciation for networks and hardware from this role, often having to sort it out remotely with no spares in some dark and damp hotel basement. We moved to Netware Boot ROMs eventually and they ensured a couple of good nights sleep each week.
The funniest story I have here was with the advent of floppy drives, trying to offer support to a hotel in Rotorua over the phone from Auckland the user could not get the drive to read the disks. They had tried multiple disks (at the time 5 1/4 disks were notoriously unreliable). However it was not until I had driven to Rotorua to assist I notice they had been folding the 5 1/4 disk and pushing it into the 3 1/2 is slot (remember the old 720k Hard floppies). Very funny.
Then there was the user (Parnell based this one) who had an SX25 chipped workstation, who could not boot it up. They read the X25 part and called in Telecom ... hmm ok?
It was about here I got to use (on a rostered support basis), my first cellular phone! - Now I ask you how cool would it be to have one of these today?
Hotel Computer Systems specialised in Reservation IT systems for Hotel chains (one was Quality Hotels). I worked on Sales Database Analysis (Foxpro based) with their chain of hotels and a number of independents. This system managed a loyalty based program.
Hotelier Five Star was the main software application from HCS.
The code was rumoured to have been written over a period of over 15 years, but hundreds of developers I too added by pieces of code. This was written in GW-Basic and used low level text-based data to store info in tables.
GW-Basic was around in the mid 80's and peaked about 1985. By the early 90's it was well past its use-by date - and this application was pushing the limits big time.
It was based on an earlier version of Microsoft Basic (of Bill Gates fame). Later it became Qbasic - which some know of as Quickbasic.
In GW Basic, I remember spending hours moving out comments and abbreviating text to find a few more bytes to add the smallest line of code (we had maxed out the number of bytes of code which GW basic could handle).
Those were trying days - and at the time some of the biggest hotels in the country depended on it. The 'goto' and 'gosub' nesting was horrendous.
I also remember version upgrades to the underlying basic, needing video card upgrades as a result (CGA - VGA?), which in turn conflicted with the Netware cards and brought the whole thing down - oh the memories!
I have a recollection of 80+ people waiting to checkout and get on their tourist buses (two of them full) in Christchurch (the hotel will remain nameless), the the computer server had just crashed and erased all the data. That day I was training a new guy - it was his first day. We did 48 hours with no sleep or food trying to get it all going again - then he quit that same week. We had to 'engineer' a fictitious account - to get everyone through.
Here I was also a key player in the support team often flying all round the country to bring back to life dead Novell Netware servers. I got a good appreciation for networks and hardware from this role, often having to sort it out remotely with no spares in some dark and damp hotel basement. We moved to Netware Boot ROMs eventually and they ensured a couple of good nights sleep each week.
The funniest story I have here was with the advent of floppy drives, trying to offer support to a hotel in Rotorua over the phone from Auckland the user could not get the drive to read the disks. They had tried multiple disks (at the time 5 1/4 disks were notoriously unreliable). However it was not until I had driven to Rotorua to assist I notice they had been folding the 5 1/4 disk and pushing it into the 3 1/2 is slot (remember the old 720k Hard floppies). Very funny.
Then there was the user (Parnell based this one) who had an SX25 chipped workstation, who could not boot it up. They read the X25 part and called in Telecom ... hmm ok?
It was about here I got to use (on a rostered support basis), my first cellular phone! - Now I ask you how cool would it be to have one of these today?
On the software front I developed (of my own back) a Conference and Event Management and planning software application, which soon got adopted by HCS. It actually became a near flagship product for them.
I also acted as a sole technical support guru for other Foxpro developers in NZ (as Microsoft did not have any dedicated resource at the time), and I was even recognised in a formal letter from Microsoft in Redmond, USA for this. I had also submitted several 'whitepapers' to the Microsoft Developer forum around VFP technical issues.
Geac Computer Corporation (Canada bought HCS at this time), now I was working for one very big machine.
With this application I had built (called Mosaic) you could graphically draw the event rooms and the software would manage catering, seating, layout, equipment, access, bookings, finance and any other aspects for an entire centre.
It was used by Waipuna International Conference Centre for their event management.
Being Windows based (by then Foxpro was in a Windows Shell - v2.5w) it was a real hit - and very bleeding edge.
Hotelier Five Star as I understand it, got canned primarily as a result of the Y2K fiasco - the clients were badly let down and left out in the cold from my recollection.
Sure, the technology was old, and granted it was very date dependant application - but did it have Y2K issues? - most programmers at the time thought not so - the point is the company did not even check - Hotels were simply not their focus going forward.
August 1999, 43 hotels received a letter saying there would be no further technical or business support for Hotelier Five Star from Sept 1999. End.
On top of these I was charged with developing a system to manage all of the end to end processes around the NZ Heart Foundations lottery system. This was a huge development project. I built the system which mailed out the trickets, checked the validity and auditing, drew the winners and managed all the associated finances and balancing for the charity. It was a huge success for marketing Data Systems at the time. This contract became their core bread and butter business eventually.
Later I worked for a Melbourne based company (I was based in Auckland), and let the development of a very complex payroll system. It was complex in that any one customer who needed to use it, essentially required each user to see and use different screens and terminology. For example, a user in Sydney may call the Last name a Lastname, another in Perth my use the term Surname, or Secondname. There were infinite combinations of all the fields the system had to manage.
So, I designed a database which held this huge matrix of information, using network API's it knew who had logged on, and build screen and validation code customised to their needs on the fly. It then compiled it and ran it for the user instantly without the user even needed to know - this was a very cool application.
Every aspect could be customised to every user, the position and colour of a field on the screen for example. This was a Foxpro front end to a mainframe back end. It is now days most closely termed a 'data driven' application.
The application was used as the core payroll system at the time for Coles and David Jones chains.
During this time Visual Basic was making a growth spurt under Microsoft and the common database system to use was now largely MS Access or SQl Server. These were painful though as you needed to configure and maintain ODBC links, buffering, transactional rollbacks, offline recordsets etc.
To me it was flexible - but messy and disjointed, and it all needed so much code.
It certainly required a lot more code to do simple things like move the record pointer around and build recordsets.
I did some work in this space for a number of companies - but it was not my favourite that's for sure.
Most people around this time who really 'knew their salt' were preferring Foxpro or SQL Server. Later MS Access became the bain of every business, as every man and his dog had a personal unsupported Access DB and associated processes hiding under their desk.
In my career I have done many a job, ripping out Access and rebuilding with SQL. In that sense I made good money from MS Access I suppose you could say. As a closing note - It is a fact worth considering that not until MS Access 2007 (using ACCDB) was released - was it accepted as being technically stable with reasonable dataset sizes and speeds.
1996 - Sybase - SQL Server
More to follow
1999 - Wang (NZ)
Exposure here to SQL Server
It was called Sybase originally. It was later sold to Microsoft (after all - wasn't everything !?) - I didn't really get my teeth into it until I worked for Gen-i (version 6.5).
Wang later changed its name and traded as gen-i, which eventually got purchased by Telecom. While at Wang I worked in Knowledge solutions specialising in imaging, scanning and document management systems such as Filenet, Trim and the like.
I left after years and rejoined after the Telecom acquisition and worked in Sales (Hamilton).
2007 - Visual Foxpro
Fox Technologies merged with Microsoft in 1992, after which the software acquired further features and the prefix "Visual".
I just loved VFP, version 9 was a hit. Its 2013 when I write this and I still have a copy of the Dev install DVD.
VFP 3 - 1995
Then Microsoft announced it would not longer be in production - talk about devastating.
"We're not announcing the end of FoxPro: Obviously, FoxPro applications will continue to work. By some of our internal estimates, there are more applications running in FoxPro 2.6 than there are in VFP and FoxPro 2.6 hasn't been supported in many years. Visual FoxPro 9 will be supported by Microsoft through 2015.
The legendary data access performance in FoxPro stems from its Rushmore query optimization and use of fixed length storage of data. Rushmore creates bit-mapped indexes that allow the engine to very quickly determine whether each row in a table meets a criteria and should therefore be included in a query's result set. Fixed width storage of data ensures that a field will be in the same location from row to row, making that field easier to locate.
My gut feel is that this was kept very quiet due to the fact there was a huge community behind VFP - and they were all Windows licenced users (and Mr Freebie Linux was waiting in the wings) ... not to mention that lucrative $QL $erver licencing model...
I realised that via the company I worked for it was me vs Microsoft on this one - I backed down. At this point I saw I would need to move away from development and into another career path. I eventually choose Sales.
DocuWiz
When I was introduced to Wise Management Services they had a very common problem, they had many MS Access Databases in many location without unique key values, and a desperate need to record important information and be able to report on it. The system housed Mental Health patient data.
My job was to redevelop the entire system, centralise all of the data and add a lot of functionality. I was lucky, the people I worked with at the client’s site were very accommodating and I was able to adopt an agile development style (in fact before Agile was called Agile). The resulting product (“Phacts”) became very core to the company’s success. They ran with it for some time before .NET had matured and the evitable rework into .Net took place. They later formed a separate company around this application. I was very proud of this application, it delivered to a key social area, and worked fantastically well. It was a Visual Foxpro with SQL Server backend on Windows Terminal Server (x3) Delivery platform. Credit goes out to Dave Roe here for his exceptional infrastructure knowledge and work.
My job was to redevelop the entire system, centralise all of the data and add a lot of functionality. I was lucky, the people I worked with at the client’s site were very accommodating and I was able to adopt an agile development style (in fact before Agile was called Agile). The resulting product (“Phacts”) became very core to the company’s success. They ran with it for some time before .NET had matured and the evitable rework into .Net took place. They later formed a separate company around this application. I was very proud of this application, it delivered to a key social area, and worked fantastically well. It was a Visual Foxpro with SQL Server backend on Windows Terminal Server (x3) Delivery platform. Credit goes out to Dave Roe here for his exceptional infrastructure knowledge and work.
2011 - Apple Mac Book Air– and I’m converted - Steve Jobs - you got me you bugger!
Ok, these days I'm more of a user than a developer. I can still cut code in my favourite languages (as I proved recently) so it was good to see the skills are like riding a bike. Fair to say the front wheel was a little buckled and the frame rusted, but it still did the distance.
I can use Parallels to open Windows if I need it (Im finding Im not needing Windows however)
Amazingly the MBA just works, I open the lid, it turns on instantly and never crashes and the battery lasts for ever, it never gets hot, its ridiculously light - What the hell have I been thinking all these years !
As I purchased her in Australia, I have named her Matilda.
In the last year or so being more business focused I have moved my career into Contracted Business Analyst work.
.... more to follow...
I upgraded in 2013 to a MACBOOK Pro. 13" with the Retina Screen. It gave me more processing power and also more storage onboard.
The Cloud and beyond
.... more to follow...
I sync my key files to the cloud, and use Timemachine for backups.
Im also doing my electronics (Arduino) on my MBP, which led me to upgrade during 2016.
Currently, I have a new Macbook Pro (with Touch).
Its a whopping 16GB Ram, 1TB SSD and I have scored the really quick 3.3 GHZ i7 Intel chipset. Nice !!!
Its running with USB3, which is very cool - and very fast indeed !
2007 - Visual Foxpro
Fox Technologies merged with Microsoft in 1992, after which the software acquired further features and the prefix "Visual".
I just loved VFP, version 9 was a hit. Its 2013 when I write this and I still have a copy of the Dev install DVD.
This is my opinion was the best and most flexible programming language I had ever used.
I loved to write code which would write and compile itself and then run using the macro substitution '&', and the string handling capabilities were awesome.
Over my career, I used the following versions very extensively;
VFP 5 - 1997
VFP 6 - 2000 (this was also an awesome version)
VFP 7 - 2002
VFP 7 - 2002
VFP 8 - 2003
VFP 9 - 2004
VFP 9 SP1 - 2007
VFP 9 SP2 - 2009
VFP 9 - 2004
VFP 9 SP1 - 2007
VFP 9 SP2 - 2009
Then Microsoft announced it would not longer be in production - talk about devastating.
This was the move to .Net that I (and a huge community) had dreaded.
"We're very aware of the FoxPro community and that played a large part in what we announced on March 13th. It's never an easy decision to announce that we're not going to release another version of a product and it's one that we consider very carefully.
"We're not announcing the end of FoxPro: Obviously, FoxPro applications will continue to work. By some of our internal estimates, there are more applications running in FoxPro 2.6 than there are in VFP and FoxPro 2.6 hasn't been supported in many years. Visual FoxPro 9 will be supported by Microsoft through 2015.
"For Microsoft to continue to evolve the FoxPro base, we would need to look at creating a 64-bit development environment and that would involve an almost complete rewrite of the core product. We've also invested in creating a scalable database with SQL Server, including the freely available SQL Server Express Edition. As far as forming a partnership with a third-party is concerned, we've heard from a number of large FoxPro customers that this would make it impossible for them to continue to use FoxPro since it would no longer be from an approved vendor. We felt that putting the environment into open source on CodePlex, which balances the needs of both the community and the large customers, was the best path forward."
Despite the verbage, it was the end of VFP. I've since written a number of small apps and tools - but at some point that dead horse really is just a dead horse and you have to stop beating it.
In my view Microsoft caved to the user base of Visual Basic who had long adopted MS Access as the underlying DBMS, by the time they acquired Foxpro they had already invested and publicly backed sybase SQL Server.
They did not fully look at the technical capabilities (or more correctly 'potential') of SQL vs VFP.
In fact I understand that a great deal of the Rushmore Optimisation technology was taken from VFP and added to SQL Server to shore it up. Incidentally Rushmore Database technology was also taken from Foxpro and inserted into the MS Access DB engine after Microsoft took over Foxpro early on.
A quick search on the web and I found this which supports what I knew at the time;
Rushmore is a data access technique that permits sets of records to be accessed very efficiently. Rushmore query optimization uses indexes efficiently to quickly find a set of records. It is used on queries that involve restrictions on multiple-indexed fields. Rushmore is an exclusive technology for rapidly selecting sets of records from tables. It can reduce query response times from hours or minutes to seconds.
The legendary data access performance in FoxPro stems from its Rushmore query optimization and use of fixed length storage of data. Rushmore creates bit-mapped indexes that allow the engine to very quickly determine whether each row in a table meets a criteria and should therefore be included in a query's result set. Fixed width storage of data ensures that a field will be in the same location from row to row, making that field easier to locate.
Starting with the Rushmore query technology in the Visual FoxPro 2.0 release, FoxPro's primary attraction has been its fast data engine. It doesn't seem to have lost that edge over the years: posted reports on the newsgroups claim the new release of Visual FoxPro is twice as fast as SQL Server, for 50 users or less.
My gut feel is that this was kept very quiet due to the fact there was a huge community behind VFP - and they were all Windows licenced users (and Mr Freebie Linux was waiting in the wings) ... not to mention that lucrative $QL $erver licencing model...
... well played Micro$oft !
I realised that via the company I worked for it was me vs Microsoft on this one - I backed down. At this point I saw I would need to move away from development and into another career path. I eventually choose Sales.
The above is my opinion of course and I'll finish up saying - Yes - I am biased, but that is my opinion, also SQL did always have some functionality which VFP did not (ie. Improved security etc). But that works both ways, and both DBMS's required further developmental improvements.
VBA and MS Office Integration
More to follow
DocuWiz
More to follow
Visual Foxpro / SQL Server Hybrid
My job was to redevelop the entire system, centralise all of the data and add a lot of functionality. I was lucky, the people I worked with at the client’s site were very accommodating and I was able to adopt an agile development style (in fact before Agile was called Agile). The resulting product (“Phacts”) became very core to the company’s success. They ran with it for some time before .NET had matured and the evitable rework into .Net took place. They later formed a separate company around this application. I was very proud of this application, it delivered to a key social area, and worked fantastically well. It was a Visual Foxpro with SQL Server backend on Windows Terminal Server (x3) Delivery platform. Credit goes out to Dave Roe here for his exceptional infrastructure knowledge and work.
My job was to redevelop the entire system, centralise all of the data and add a lot of functionality. I was lucky, the people I worked with at the client’s site were very accommodating and I was able to adopt an agile development style (in fact before Agile was called Agile). The resulting product (“Phacts”) became very core to the company’s success. They ran with it for some time before .NET had matured and the evitable rework into .Net took place. They later formed a separate company around this application. I was very proud of this application, it delivered to a key social area, and worked fantastically well. It was a Visual Foxpro with SQL Server backend on Windows Terminal Server (x3) Delivery platform. Credit goes out to Dave Roe here for his exceptional infrastructure knowledge and work.
Career next Steps
The onset of .NET and C# caused me to have a rethink about my career path really.
I've been there and done that with databases, even mixing and matching and embedding different technologies to build solutions.
With the advent of .NET the paradigm shifts again and many developers talk of moving to C#.
Personally I think that is a backwards move and I really cant be bothered starting with what I perceived to be a low level language.
On top of this there are noises about Microsoft dropping Foxpro out of the .NET fold - which I also think is a bad move - to say nothing about it making many years of my personal knowledge effectively redundant.
Yes, I could start again - but I'm just not up for it - and which path .NET, Java, VB.NET or C# - any of these could become preferred or obsolete over the next year or two.
The early days of .Net were very 'library' based and a bit like coding using a stack of API's.
The early days of .Net were very 'library' based and a bit like coding using a stack of API's.
I fought a couple of internal battles where management had been 'sold to' by Microsoft whereas I disagreed that the 'new' technology was mature. I won there and developed some great apps at this time. One of the better ones being the one for Wise Management Services mentioned above.
I really got quite disillusioned with technical management at this point, and I had a striong interest in moving my career up a notch to work more closely with customers directly. At this point I moved my career into sales, and work for a further 7 years in Account Management (still in the IT/Business space mostly) - then a further number of years doing Business Analysis work.
iPhone, and other gadgets
One of the best gadgets I had over this period had to be my D7000 Nikon DSLR Camera. Awesome piece of kit and still going strong. See my Photography blog for more info and photos.
These days its not longer odd to be a geek, in fact if yoiu cant use technolkogy you are the odd one out - how weird is that? Likewise everyone is an expert. Not that Digital SLR's are out and very advanced (when compared to your average poloid), everybody is suddenly a professional photographer.
These days its not longer odd to be a geek, in fact if yoiu cant use technolkogy you are the odd one out - how weird is that? Likewise everyone is an expert. Not that Digital SLR's are out and very advanced (when compared to your average poloid), everybody is suddenly a professional photographer.
I had a large number of PC's, notebooks over the years, my favorites being Toshiba's - particularly the Satellite Pro series.
I'm not looking for something that really is a notebook, same power, ok storage, good for Photography but I can carry it without thinking - enter Mac Book Air
Ok, these days I'm more of a user than a developer. I can still cut code in my favourite languages (as I proved recently) so it was good to see the skills are like riding a bike. Fair to say the front wheel was a little buckled and the frame rusted, but it still did the distance.
I bought my MBA early 2011 and it pissed me off for a good few weeks to be honest- way too different to Windows, but then I warmed to it, a found a couple of ways I could mod things using Automator and apple scripting (which is a little ugly I must say) - and I was hooked !
Amazingly the MBA just works, I open the lid, it turns on instantly and never crashes and the battery lasts for ever, it never gets hot, its ridiculously light - What the hell have I been thinking all these years !
As I purchased her in Australia, I have named her Matilda.
In the last year or so being more business focused I have moved my career into Contracted Business Analyst work.
.... more to follow...
I upgraded in 2013 to a MACBOOK Pro. 13" with the Retina Screen. It gave me more processing power and also more storage onboard.
The Cloud and beyond
.... more to follow...
I sync my key files to the cloud, and use Timemachine for backups.
Im also doing my electronics (Arduino) on my MBP, which led me to upgrade during 2016.
Currently, I have a new Macbook Pro (with Touch).
Its a whopping 16GB Ram, 1TB SSD and I have scored the really quick 3.3 GHZ i7 Intel chipset. Nice !!!
Its running with USB3, which is very cool - and very fast indeed !
My first thoughts on this new bit of kit ....
I have my new MAC Book Pro -late 2016 (Touch bar) - 16GB, 512 SSD with the 3.3GHZ i7 chip. I got one of the first in Brisbane I understand (20/11/2016) . Very happy with performance. Lucky for me Apple stuffed up my order and I got 10% of the price. I had canceled my online order and ended up picking up the only one they had in store. They had accidentally misreported the specs to me and I cancelled my online order only to find the one in store was a higher spec. I took that as my online order was only days away - and had now been cancelled. So I got the upgrade effectively free.
Im a heavy user I do software development , Arduino electronics and data analysis on a regular basis. The MAC is the center of my world for all data and office activities. I am also an author and do a lot of digital photography (see my blog below). And I write Excel VBA apps that would make your toes curl. Im now just starting to experiment with Swift in Xcode 8.
Im a heavy user I do software development , Arduino electronics and data analysis on a regular basis. The MAC is the center of my world for all data and office activities. I am also an author and do a lot of digital photography (see my blog below). And I write Excel VBA apps that would make your toes curl. Im now just starting to experiment with Swift in Xcode 8.
- The bigger trackpad has been a bit odd. I seem to sometime nudge it or something and find myself typing midway through a word a few paragraphs back. Just a case of getting used to it I suspect. The Force click and Haptic feedback I turned off. I was dragging folders around when I only wanted to right or double click them - it got a bit scary - thank you Mr. UNDO !
- That new Touch bar… A gimmick? Well on the face of it yes, but once you start using it it becomes a habit. The oddest thing I have found is breaking the habit and looking to your keyboard for visual feedback - it’s a 30 year habit to break for me !. Many apps of course don’t support it yet, but I can see it being very useful going forward.
- No GetMail button available for touch bar in OSX Mail - everything else is there!
- No TouchBar config for Calendar application at all
- Time machine backup was not able to be restored onto new Macbook as it was 'not compatible with an earlier MacBook" !! WTF !??? … as my old MAC no longer lives in this world - this was a major problem ! - My data came back to me via Google Drive and I attempted to bring back apps via the Migration Assistant - which worked but did not bring over my licenses. Weird
- Two times, the . sound has not worked until a restart. My old MAC much more reliable than that. Some users arte reporting GPU screen issues - Ive not had that as yet.
- No 'charging' LED light on the charger. A little bit annoying when you have left the wall switch off ! :-( … charge time is similar to my past MAC
- I note that when the battery runs flat, then you have to hit the power to restart once on power - the touchbar seems to disappear and not come back until you restart the computer - thats a bit mucky.
- My gut feeling is that the battery life is about 15% less. It is hard to tell accurately as Ive been using the new MacBook a lot more - setting it up etc, and also been playing with location services and trying to get a decent joke out of SIRI. But it seems to chew through the battery a bit more. Also seems to get a little warm at times.
- The charger cable is quite thick and heavy, may be able to use this to jump start my car!! I do miss magsafe
- About those ports - friggin awesome. I bought USB C dongles from eBay for about $20. Moved a 256mb CSV file from my usb via a dongle cable to the new MAC USB-C port. I cant even observe the progress indicator in time - it happened in less then a second. Being able to plug in my power cable to any port has been a strange new feeling. No longer draped over or under things to reach around to the other side of my computer. Also I think the cable is a smidge longer which is good.
In 2023 - A massive Evolution, AI has arrived.
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