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If I were a programmer... No... that's NOT what I would want to do in life. I considered website design 20 years ago... has it been that long? For sure it's been over 15 years now. I have a background in graphic arts, drafting and design. I did compose some basic webpages for friends before but I never took it any further. My brother took computer science in the local community college. That was around 1966-67 and I remember him bringing home stacks of 'punch cards' with rubber bands holding them in sequence. The cards were programs... each card was a line of code and the machine (computer) read each card and followed the instructions the same way lines of code are written in more advanced systems. It all started somewhere. One of the first large companies I worked for had a machine that processed payroll by punch tapes. In the same manner as a player piano, a one inch wide spool of paper tape was fed into a reader/writer device. The operator entered the information and it would punch out holes in a sequence that could be stored and reread at a later date. they would pullout the previous roll, read it, modify the data and rewrite it to a clean roll of tape to save for the next session. This 'computer' was a desk with a keyboard built into a complete console about the size of 2 refrigerators side by side and it had spools for creating the programs. Back to programming. At that same company. I was the first to have a personal computer. It was a Commodore PET with cassette for program storage. The first programs I used with it were typed in by hand from lines read in a book. After, I subscribed to a 'magazine on tape' and programs were read by the cassettes they mailed out to us. The PET had a 40 character wide screen and I (again) was first to buy their 80 character business venture. That was around 1980. It was my job to check contract prices for every order we processed and split the costing for the accounting department. I wrote a simple program that broke-down the needed percentages for materials, labor, installation and taxes, complete with rounding off to the nearest dollar. Simple, but effective as we sometimes processed a few hundred orders per session. Somewhere in the 1980's I had switched from Commodore to an IBM clone and using a program called Lotus 123 for calculations to do millwork estimates. It was a simple spreadsheet where you enter the material the quantity you needed and it would lookup the cost and waste factor from a database we would regularly update. The result is it would determine the amount of material needed and the price. My claim to fame is one of the co-workers using this program was still using it 10 years after I left the company. The company I'm working for now has some customized software to maintain our accounting and scheduling and a few times a year the person who wrote the program/software visits us to implement updates and get our wish-list and list of bugs we have found. I really have no inclination to learn more about programming, but I'm confident in telling the programmer what features I'm looking for to make the program do what I feel it should do so I can get my work done. Thanks for reading my blog! |
