Best ride in the park (1 Viewer)

[TCHamilton]

Hi AccessWorld folks,
I'm TC, a programmer from 1980 in the land of IBM and DEC FORTAN and DEC assembler(Macro-11). Yep, old stuff, moved to mini-computers(DEC, Honeywell and HP), and to 8088 PC's in 1983 using dBase II, R:Base 4000/5000, MultiMate, WordPerfect, Symphony, SuperCalc, VisiCalc... primitive maybe - but it got the job done and got us to here. Tons of dBase/Clipper/Paradox(for DOS) scripts powering fairly demanding workloads.
Surviving those waters, I got into Borland Turbo C/Turbo Assembler in the mid 80's which took me through to the Microsoft stack and ultimately SQL Server, Visual Studio, and Office - back when MS Word shipped on over 30 3.5" floppy disks.....
Now I live in SQL Server/Oracle writing lots of SSIS/SSRS and T-SQL to feed my VS C# apps and web apps, lots of Office automations - way too much fun - more cool things to come

 

[Jon]

Welcome to the forums! We are the most active Microsoft Access community on the internet by far, with posts going back over 20 years!

To get started, I highly recommend you read the post below. It contains important information for all new users to this forum.

https://www.access-programmers.co.uk/forums/threads/new-member-read-me-first.223250/

We look forward to having you around here, learning stuff and having fun!

 

[pbaldy]

Welcome aboard TC!

 

[theDBguy]

Hi. Welcome to AWF!

 

[Gasman]

Hi TC,
What Honeywell computers did you use?

 

[The_Doc_Man]

Hello, TC. I'm an old DEC guy myself - PDP 11/many and VAX 11/780 plus many others that ran OpenVMS. Including the Compaq Alpha and the HP Itaniums. From FORTRAN-IID and more assemblers than I care to count, plus procedural languages including ALGOL, a gazillion versions of BASIC, PASCAL, PL/1G, ... plus working on the PC in various ways. Those old systems were tons of fun and incredibly effective for what they did.

We used DEC Datatrieve at one place which was where I first learns about SQL. Then I also went the Borland Paradox route - though I thought that Paradox for DOS was good but they screwed the pooch on Paradox for Windows. In fact, Paradox/WIN was what made me try Access 2.0, because MS had a special deal - X dollars off if you could prove you had a copy of Paradox - which I did, of course.

I never had a chance to play much with Honeywell computers, but some of the mid-size beasts had interesting instruction sets, including I think the H4800 that was SO deeply stack-oriented that except for PUSH, POP, and CALL, all instructions were zero-address - fully stack-centric. And bizarre.

 

[Galaxiom]

My first computer experience was in 1977 using FORTRAN programmed with mark sense cards on a PDP11. The next year was a big leap forward when we had access to terminals.

October that year I dropped out of university and started looking for a job with computers. I had not been looking long when I was involved in a car accident on the way to an aptitude test for a job to be trained as a programmer. Although I was not injured, my car was destroyed and my life went off on a tangent.

I then had nothing to do with computers until 1989 when I bought an Amstrad PPC512 portable which ran DOS 3.3 on an 8 MHz 8086 compatible processor. I had no mains power where I lived and this one was 12 volt.

 

[oleronesoftwares]

Welcome @TCHamilton to the best online forum for Ms Access Developers.

 

[TCHamilton]

Thank you

 

[TCHamilton]

Welcome aboard TC!

Thank you - glad to be here

 

[TCHamilton]

My first computer experience was in 1977 using FORTRAN programmed with mark sense cards on a PDP11. The next year was a big leap forward when we had access to terminals.

October that year I dropped out of university and started looking for a job with computers. I had not been looking long when I was involved in a car accident on the way to an aptitude test for a job to be trained as a programmer. Although I was not injured, my car was destroyed and my life went off on a tangent.

I then had nothing to do with computers until 1989 when I bought an Amstrad PPC512 portable which ran DOS 3.3 on an 8 MHz 8086 compatible processor. I had no mains power where I lived and this one was 12 volt.

You're killin' me - I started life punch-card FORTRAN/IBM 360/85 and HoneyWell 6060. I even had one computer (Adage) that booted from aluminized ticker tape... Now look where we are

 

[TCHamilton]

Hi. Welcome to AWF!

Thank you - glad to be here

 

[TCHamilton]

Hello, TC. I'm an old DEC guy myself - PDP 11/many and VAX 11/780 plus many others that ran OpenVMS. Including the Compaq Alpha and the HP Itaniums. From FORTRAN-IID and more assemblers than I care to count, plus procedural languages including ALGOL, a gazillion versions of BASIC, PASCAL, PL/1G, ... plus working on the PC in various ways. Those old systems were tons of fun and incredibly effective for what they did.

We used DEC Datatrieve at one place which was where I first learns about SQL. Then I also went the Borland Paradox route - though I thought that Paradox for DOS was good but they screwed the pooch on Paradox for Windows. In fact, Paradox/WIN was what made me try Access 2.0, because MS had a special deal - X dollars off if you could prove you had a copy of Paradox - which I did, of course.

I never had a chance to play much with Honeywell computers, but some of the mid-size beasts had interesting instruction sets, including I think the H4800 that was SO deeply stack-oriented that except for PUSH, POP, and CALL, all instructions were zero-address - fully stack-centric. And bizarre.

Hi Doc Man
I still remember my boot-toggles for my PDP 11/70's - we had 4 networked together doing some very interesting science (GEODSS project). Escaped punch cards to terminal life programming DEC FORTAN IV Plus and DEC Macro-11 for writing the device drivers. We did some amazing things with those systems.
Within a few years I was in private industry exploring PC's (IBM 5150 8088/512Kb twin-floppy, HP 6845B(cassettes!) AST Above Board and IOMega Bernoulli 10+10 boxes... early 160 and 300 baud modems trying to run bulletin boards-would kill for 2400 baud, then 9600b Hayes. No more jumpers and DIP switches..., plug and play (well mostly)
Loving what we can do with the Raspberry PI's and my home-grown LINUX systems. Way too much fun, can do almost anything cyber-MacGyver style
Looking forward to reading more of your work and others here on AWF - thank you for writing

 

[oleronesoftwares]

My first computer experience was in 1977 using FORTRAN programmed with mark sense cards on a PDP11. The next year was a big leap forward when we had access to terminals.

October that year I dropped out of university and started looking for a job with computers. I had not been looking long when I was involved in a car accident on the way to an aptitude test for a job to be trained as a programmer. Although I was not injured, my car was destroyed and my life went off on a tangent.

I then had nothing to do with computers until 1989 when I bought an Amstrad PPC512 portable which ran DOS 3.3 on an 8 MHz 8086 compatible processor. I had no mains power where I lived and this one was 12 volt.

That was a year before i was born.

 

[oleronesoftwares]

Hi Doc Man
I still remember my boot-toggles for my PDP 11/70's - we had 4 networked together doing some very interesting science (GEODSS project). Escaped punch cards to terminal life programming DEC FORTAN IV Plus and DEC Macro-11 for writing the device drivers. We did some amazing things with those systems.

So this question goes to all members on this forum that has over 40 years of work experience, what has been your motivation all these years? I need to learn from the elders in the house.