Coding for 50+ years

[TOPSie]

I started out in 1969 coding at Assembler level with some COBOL thrown in. I eventually graduated to VB.net after 20 years in operating systems. I dabbled with Access for some home projects, then a friend asked me to help out supporting his business application. It is a large Access application dating back over 15 years and it pretty stable. But my friend like perfection and his business is constantly evolving (e.g. coping with Covid when a third of his customers shut down, but many others stepped up).
So the last year has been interesting and I think I am finally getting the hang of SQL, but still in the foothills of my learning curve.
Hopefully I can seek help here and maybe answer some of the easier questions. Let's see......

 

[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!

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[Minty]

Hi, And welcome aboard AWF!

 

[Jon]

50+ years of coding is incredible! I remember doing 6502 assembly language programming back in the day, but that was around 1980. Very little documentation on how to do stuff back then, so you had to rely on your own wits. And you couldn't ask others as there were hardly any other programmers out there.

 

[TOPSie]

Don't get me started. I worked with a pencil and pre-printed coding sheets, and you never actually saw a computer. Didn't even have a phone on the desk, the big pencil sharpener with a handle was the latest technology - but you had to share it with the whole office. But the manuals were actually pretty good (which was a good job without the Internet)

 

[Jon]

I remember the PET computers at school and college. They were ring-fenced, and you only got VERY limited access, a few minutes a week. The geeky students running that club were power-hungry gatekeepers!

 

[The_Doc_Man]

Hello, TOPSie, I'm an old systems guy myself, with background in IBM 1620 assembler plus DEC PDP-10, PDP-11, and VAX assembler. Also an old device-driver guy for PDP-11s. The 1620 didn't HAVE device drivers, it was too "raw" for that. I kind of back-doored my way here after a long time in the Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) field.

 

[TOPSie]

My first project was on an ICL System 4 writing an on-line banking system (branches on-line, not customers) I was entrusted with the main account file access. Writing records to disc at the most physical level. We did work out that if certain records were written in a specific order then the track would "overflow" and corrupt its own header. It was only later that I realised that this code was the most basic function of an operating system and that System 4 didn't really have one

 

[jdraw]

Welcome TOPSie. My programming interest was piqued when a fellow worker got to go on a 3 day "computer course" and he showed me a QuikTran terminal session (mid '60s)

 

[AccessBlaster]

Making my own DOS menus with drop shadows, it didn't get much better then that.

Welcome aboard.

 

[theDBguy]

Hi. Welcome to AWF!

 

[JMongi]

Welcome!

 

[Dreamweaver]

Hi welcome aboard