Back when I had hair.
Meh - at least I don't have bad hair days anymore.
Meh - at least I don't have bad hair days anymore.
I got a Vic 20 one Christmas, and an Amstrad CPC a couple of years after that. In between I played games on an Atari 2600. Kids these days with their ray-traced high-octane graphics.
Nothing wrong with simple graphics. The gameplay was the core, and many an hour was spent shooting ducks.
From there my first job was Systems Administrator at Braintree Council. This was when Windows 3.11 was a thing.
Days when you not only stressed about running out of memory, but running out of resources too. Can you download more resources?
This was when you had to fight with himem.sys. While a PC had GBs of memory (ok, it could only take a maximum of 256 MB) DOS could only handle 640 KB, and in that, you had to squeeze network drivers, mouse drivers and maybe even a graphics driver.
Aah, NetWare. NT 3.5 was around and for some reason we went with NetWare. It worked, and it was my first exposure to working on a server. I changed the Admin password one day and promptly forgot it. We had to hire a guy I had to pick up from Witham train station to come down and spend the day resetting it. These days you can download a CD and do it yourself.
We later moved to Windows NT.
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It was exciting installing software from a floppy disk.
From a cover disk (PC Plus used to be great for providing great software .. AutoRoute before Microsoft bought it, file managers that exposed ZIP files as normal folders (it would only be until Windows 95 came along until that became the norm...) and shareware .. programs that were 'trialware' where you could try software and bought it if you liked it) I built DOS databases using File Express. Before that, we were using Lotus 1-2-3 as a database. Even today people use Excel as a database, so good to know we were cutting edge over thirty years ago.
For the avoidance of doubt, Excel (and Lotus 1-2-3) are spreadsheets, and should NOT be used as databases. No, just don't. Ever. If you do do this, get CS Computer Services to build you a proper system.
But File Express was great. Our Health and Safety officer loved it, and built so many systems. He'd print out report after report (remember dot-matrix printers?) where he could enter dates and notes all day long.
Our key system was an employee sickness system. The requirement was to work out the percentage of sickness each employee had. As our key business was refuse collection, there was quite a high sickness rate and we wanted to track the people who regularly had Friday and Monday off for long weekends. A simple idea was to add a record for every week for every employee. This way, you could add up all the 'available' hours for a period, and the number of days sick. Well, it worked, but doesn't scale up that well. After two years and 60 staff, thats 6,240 records. And most of those are empty. Each month you'd have to add more and more blank records.
Then Visual Basic appeared on a cover disk. v3.0
These days, splash screens are more than 8.5 MB in size.
VB came with a database control (7th row, middle icon). This connected to an Access database, so now you could build 'front ends' to a database. Click a button and it would add a record, or update a field value to another value. Woooow. As per the opening paragraph about Atari 2600's, this was a time when this was all new and fun. These days even your microwave can send WhatsApp notifications to your toaster and your kettle scans your biometric levels to determine how hot your tea should be, but in '94, having the power to easily add a button to your own application that did something made you feel like a power God. Even if you did need to install a bunch of annoying runtimes. This was before .Net Frameworks, but you still had to install drivers and runtimes to get the database bits working. Or worse, install Crystal Reports to get reports running.