Age yourself with....

moster67 said:

I remember those magazines.
They were not available in Italy at general newsstands so I had to go to Milano where there was a newsstand that was selling foreign magazines.
I used to try some of the programs published on the floppies on my Amiga. Who knows - maybe I tried some of yours?

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I had a neat little menu/launcher utility called Dock-It featured in Amiga Format 100 best programs and put on the cover disk. Likely you tried that. Its still on Aminet but theres no photo. Later on a starter company called Apple used Dock-it as the name for their launcher. I still wonder if I should ask for compensation for stealing my idea

John Naylor said:

@MikeH this does not surprise me one bit! You were always up for a challenge no matter where.

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I've been searching high and low for my copy of that magazine with the full page write up of my program (called KnitMate). I think its stored away somewhere safe, with the ark of the covenant. If it turns up, I'll scan and post it here - for a laugh

MikeH said:

had some of my stuff featured in such magazine greats as Amiga Format, CU Amiga and.... I kid you not.. Machine Knitting Monthly ?

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Perhaps your name was Babbage in a previous life. ?

On a related note: we had a tv program here in the 90's where each week somebody (Mick Molloy?) was given an improbably obscure magazine to read, and then had to answer questions from it. Opal cutting, pig farming, fence building, cabinet hinges, sewerage design, bell ringing... Machine Knitting Monthly would have fit right in.

My first paid coding was way back in the 70's, programming CNC machines via dial up to the US. Then onto Olivetti's to program CNC in house.
My favorite around that time was an HP85 computer, nice implementation of basic and a thermal printer and screen built in.
After that I got into programming mainframes NCR and IBM. Funny at the time I thought they had too much storage, who could ever use 11GB of storage on the NCR and 20 Odd on the IBM
Then I wrote a game for the Atari Jaguar console (Atari pulled the plug on the console just as game was being tested by publisher)

I don’t know if you would call it “paid”. But, I remember acquiring a dessert from a classmate’s lunch in exchange for helping him do his BASIC program in a Jr. HS programming course.

Remembered another... I wrote a diary program for the Spectrum when the Opus Discovery disk drives came out. It used this new technology called random access files which sped up the searching by a lot. A Spectrum magazine at the time reviewed it and were about to publish it. I didn't earn anything from that but I think it was my first for being accepted by a magazine. Must have been the late 80s.

Opus Discovery single floppy disk drive
- look at the price!

The first job for which I received an economic amount for my work was an order and sales program for a swimming pool installation company.
I did it for an Amstrad CPC 6128, I used dBase II and CPM.
It was in 1985

John Naylor said:

Your first ever paid programming experience?

For me it's a toss up between two possibles (I can't remember which was first).

It was either getting a command line (MS DOS) thing that controlled printers and output text from files to your printer being published as a handy utility on one of those disks we used to get taped to the front cover of a magazine (Might have been PC World I can't remember. What was the one with 'The Bugs' cartoon near the back page?) or, a crossword solving application (also DOS based written in Borland Turbo C) that let you put blanks and letters then gave you all possible solutions or allowed you to figure out anagrams. I was quite proud of that one at the time, I used upper case letters for actual letters then lower case (and special characters) for compression - so 'G' was a G but 'g' was 'ING'. I still have the source code for the latter

I used to get people sending me a cheque for £5 so they could receive, in return through the post, a floppy disk with a version that allowed any length of characters in a word rather than the restricted 6 that I'd set.

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My first (and only) paid programming experience was in 2006 when I made commercial (after about 1-2 years where it was free) an Excel add-in, coding mainly in VBA and VB6 to do searches on a Firebird database used in a GP clinical application, used in GP practices. The GP software was called Synergy, produced by a company called iSoft.
The searching module in Synergy was extremely slow and also could easily freeze up Synergy, causing serious problems in the GP surgery. My add-in solved all that nicely and it was quite popular. Had a simple system, £100 for one PC and £300 for a practice licence, both lasting for a year. Kept this going till 2013 when unfortunately iSoft withdrew Synergy from the market in England.

RBS

RB Smissaert said:

My first (and only) paid programming experience was in 2006 when I made commercial (after about 1-2 years where it was free) an Excel add-in, coding mainly in VBA and VB6 to do searches on a Firebird database used in a GP clinical application, used in GP practices. The GP software was called Synergy, produced by a company called iSoft.
The searching module in Synergy was extremely slow and also could easily freeze up Synergy, causing serious problems in the GP surgery. My add-in solved all that nicely and it was quite popular. Had a simple system, £100 for one PC and £300 for a practice licence, both lasting for a year. Kept this going till 2013 when unfortunately iSoft withdrew Synergy from the market in England.

RBS

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I volunteered to solve the problem of that company, because I know Firebird well, I participated at the beginning solving bugs.
They told me that they already had another person, besides my knowledge of the English language was very poor, as it is now, and that was not very helpful.

vecino said:

I volunteered to solve the problem of that company, because I know Firebird well, I participated at the beginning solving bugs.
They told me that they already had another person, besides my knowledge of the English language was very poor, as it is now, and that was not very helpful.

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They definitely had serious problems. They have disappeared now from the UK GP practice software market and I think the main one now is Emis
with some 70% of the market. Then there SystemOne and Vision.

RBS

Most expensive at the time was MS C (1983 maybe), I have MASM (1981 I think) but I think it was free. Later I was all over the Turbo/Borland $99 stuff. Never bought Pascal. I have MS BASIC as well. FYI. I threw out most, but have a few of the books left and the 5.25 floppies. LOL.. Started with 6800 and 8080a and the Bug book, way back. Just pitched a Linear 1976 book at work from school. OLD....

RB Smissaert said:

My first (and only) paid programming experience was in 2006 when I made commercial (after about 1-2 years where it was free) an Excel add-in, coding mainly in VBA and VB6 to do searches on a Firebird database used in a GP clinical application, used in GP practices. The GP software was called Synergy, produced by a company called iSoft.
The searching module in Synergy was extremely slow and also could easily freeze up Synergy, causing serious problems in the GP surgery. My add-in solved all that nicely and it was quite popular. Had a simple system, £100 for one PC and £300 for a practice licence, both lasting for a year. Kept this going till 2013 when unfortunately iSoft withdrew Synergy from the market in England.

RBS

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Synergy is not unknown to me! I wrote an EMR system for hospices - probably around 2004 - to collect patient data and produce minimum data sets. It was a replacement for a system called Palcare and myself and a colleague also wrote a huge conversion system which was madly complex given the data we were starting with. If I remember correctly it ran upwards of 15,000 lines of code which looped round breaking the data down into smaller and smaller chunks. It took around 6 months to write and apart from a few test runs to iron out the last of the bugs it was literally run just once as a working piece of code then never used again. This always amused me greatly!

John Naylor said:

Synergy is not unknown to me! I wrote an EMR system for hospices - probably around 2004 - to collect patient data and produce minimum data sets. It was a replacement for a system called Palcare and myself and a colleague also wrote a huge conversion system which was madly complex given the data we were starting with. If I remember correctly it ran upwards of 15,000 lines of code which looped round breaking the data down into smaller and smaller chunks. It took around 6 months to write and apart from a few test runs to iron out the last of the bugs it was literally run just once as a working piece of code then never used again. This always amused me greatly!

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Don't sound very funny to me, after all that work.
Why wasn't it used, even although there were no bugs left?
It was very easy to improve on that reporting module, mainly because the SQL it used was very inefficient.

RBS

RB Smissaert said:

Don't sound very funny to me, after all that work.
Why wasn't it used, even although there were no bugs left?
It was very easy to improve on that reporting module, mainly because the SQL it used was very inefficient.

RBS

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Simply because it had one job to do, and once done all the data was converted and never had to be converted again. To be fair it would have taken a team of people a number of years to convert relevant data by hand and we didn't have that kind of time. It worked out easier to convert the lot.

John Naylor said:

Simply because it had one job to do, and once done all the data was converted and never had to be converted again. To be fair it would have taken a team of people a number of years to convert relevant data by hand and we didn't have that kind of time. It worked out easier to convert the lot.

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OK, I misunderstood.

RBS

My first experience with a computer was in 1964 when on a school trip we went to Canada's Queen's University.
It was one of the few places that had a computer. That day I successfully programmed the IBM to compute the square root
of any positive number using Newton's approximation method. I did not get paid.

I was intrigued enough to enter a math program at the U of Waterloo two years later.
They had a huge (and I mean physically) IBM360, and a reputation for WatFor, their version of a one-pass Fortran compiler.
It was based on hashing, the same principle as used in B4X Maps. It was lightning fast.

In the summers of 1967 and 1968, I got my first paid job at the now defunct Automatic Electric company.
First I programmed the Parts-Explosion (the propagation of price changes of raw materials to the 10,000 parts used in company).
The computer was IBM 1401, with a bank of massive tape drives that worked relentlessly to do the work of a non-existing disk drive.
The program language was Assembler. Programmers were still a rare breed and I got paid well.

The next summer was much more interesting. The company made telephone exchanges, and was starting to convert from
electro-mechanical to electronic (not yet digital). I was asked to implement the Fortran based ECAP, an electric circuit analyzer program.
@Johan Schoeman 's current work on JSpice brought back that memory.

My next job shaped the rest of my career. I worked in a brain science lab computing spectrograms of EEG signals using Fast Fourier Time series analysis.
To make a long story shorter, I am now retired and love to code in B4X.

First paid job was coding SPS (Swedish Processing System) on an IBM 1401. Card reader (80 column), card punch, and printer.
SPS was an assembly language similar to the IBM assembly language.

This isn't paid work, but the above talk of mainframes and punched cards reminded me of age 8 when mum bought me this book, saying "it looked like something you might be interested in" :



Understatement of the Century. Changed my life. I've kept it for sentimental reasons (it's in the garage... somewhere) and it is a hoot to read nowaways.

I also remember the light-bulb moment a couple of years later when, after weeks of trying to make sense of it, I suddenly understood how binary worked (and trinary and base-26 and... everything! Well, every base numbering system, anyway.)

emexes said:

I also remember the light-bulb moment a couple of years later when, after weeks of trying to make sense of it, I suddenly understood how binary worked (and trinary and base-26 and... everything! Well, every base numbering system, anyway.)

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I always love those moments when everything suddenly makes sense. When I first started learning C there was this wonderful moment when forward and reverse pointers to make linked lists just dropped into place along with memory allocation. One minute I was confused and then.... ahhh that makes sense!

My first step into comp world was Commodore 64 and GwBasic. In PC world I was involved into Asembler programming, after that I switched to Borland C. After that we start to using in company Microsoft Visual .net. Before 3 Years I was forced to cover Linux machines with small app and here I am. And this was one of my best decision to start using different programming IDE... Love B4X