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Developer happy to be here :)

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tbax84

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Hi all, i'm happy to be a part of this vibrant community. I'm a care giver of a diabetic person in my family, and i love the possibility to learn from others in order to be better at supporting. In my day to day i'm a programmer, a musician and i love art in general.

During the last two years i started developing some utilities for the aforementioned diabetic person in my family, which is an activity that filled me with joy, as i was able to do something tangible for helping someone.

I'm sure i'll learn a lot from you all,
sincerely,
Tommaso
 
Ahh a like minded person. I too am a software developer and used my skills in developing an extensive excel application to help me manage my own diabetes. And, i too am a musician.

I am sure you wil, learn a lot from this community
 
Oh wow! what a coincidence! yes, i'm sure this is a very good place
 
Hi Tommaso

Me too lol. I spent much of my life as a computer programmer. Starting in the old days with dBase II, moving onto Clipper, Pascal and C later on. When I'm motivated to do my hobby,. I like PIC chip programming in C. I find this a good test of both hardware and software skills.

If you want to learn, you're in the right place. The users here are friendly, knowlegable and helpful. What more could you ask?

Cheers

Steve
 
Ahh the PDP8, punched tape (even punched cards), assembler, Spirit III, right through to Ada. Started off on switches on the PDP8 though. Great fun and yet very serious at the same time.
 
ahhhh...... CP/M, wordstar, dbase and supercalc. Teleprinters and the Zx81 Those were the days my friend.......
 
What a bunch of propellor-heads we are! 🙄:rofl:
 
Hello Tommaso.
I was a programmer/analyst in the olden days - Cobol, Dibol, Pascal, BBC Basic - also a singer songwriter back then.
These days I am a poet and food geek - happily re-imagining recipes into keto versions.
I haven't programmed anything for decades - not since I played about with Dream Weaver to create a web based business that supported our family in the early noughties.
 
Ah well, here goes....

ICL 1900 Plan (assembler-like, Cobol)
Microfocus Cobol (on SuperBrain 'Micro' as they were called, and ICL DRS)
Unix SVR4 - shell script
Informix
Bit of Oracle
Lots of unix 4GLs (remember those?) as they went in and out of fashion
Then came a suit and business consultancy with prototyping with MicroSoft Excel/Word scripting - yuk!
Finally came to rest on Linux - lots of scripting for myself - just 'cos I can!

What a sad bunch eh?

I think maybe we should put this in our sig block rather that all that tedious HbA1c, Cholesterol c**p.

Maybe later.....
 
I think I came into computing later than most of you. I started buidling and installing electronic control equipment which was based on the 8080. It was basically the development kit modified for the customer. Then I worked for ACT repairing Sirius and Apricot computers to component level. We used GW Basic to write software diagnostics for ram tests, strobe the address lines etc (remember PEEK and POKE?). Even further back, I worked for BT in the post office tower in brum. Most of the kit, modems, etc was based on valves, or bottles as we called them.
My mate at college had a PrinzTronic LED calculator. We found if you press 1+ and the equals key repatedly it would count. In our breaks we used to play this game, pressing the = key as fast as you can and see who could get the highest count in a minute, Unfortunately we bust the = key and he had to tell his dad 😱
Nowadays, everything's on your phone. Camera, SatNav, calculator, music player, films, stopwatch the lot.

I use my phone to process eBay orders. AndrOpenOffice as the word processor to print the labels, a Bluetooth tracker ball and a small portable Bluetooth label printer So I can work anywhere.

I do like technology 😛
 
Last edited:
picitup said:
I think I came into computing later than most of you. I started buidling an installing electronic control equipment which was based on the 8080. It was basically the development kit modified for the customer. Then I worked for ACT repairing Sirius and Apricot computers to component level. We used GW Basic to write software diagnostics for ram tests, strobe the address lines etc (remember PEEK and POKE?). Even further back, I worked for BT in the post office tower in brum. Most of the kit, modems, etc was based on valves, or bottles as we called them.
My mate at college had a PrinzTronic LED calculator. We found if you press 1+ and the equals key repatedly it would count. In our breaks we used to play this game, pressing the = key as fast as you can and see who could get the highest count in a minute, Unfortunately we bust the = key and he had to tell his dad 😱
Nowadays, everything's on your phone. Camera, SatNav, calculator, music player, films, stopwatch the lot.

I use my phone to process eBay orders. AndrOpenOffice as the word processor to print the labels, a Bluetooth tracker ball and a small portable Bluetooth label printer So I can work anywhere.

I do like technology 😛
Click to expand...
Blimey, that reminds me of stuff I had totally forgotten. The Sirius - I nearly took on reseller status of those. The floppy ran at different speeds depending on the track IIRC - some clever geeks got to play tunes. P&P - ahh! Do you remember having to format hard disks by some sort of memory hack? Don't remember the details.

It was all trail blazing fun back then. How many times were you asked what you'd been doing today, and your reply was 'oh just playing with this or that'. All to serious now eh?:(
 
Hehe yes I do remember the multi-speed drives and the tunes that were played on them. It had a device we called a Codec which could record and play back sound (now called a sound card) and someone had recorded Relax by Frankie goes to Hollywood and played it full belt in the repair centre. We all stood around in amazement.

ACT set up a clean room to repair hard disks. It took 6 months to become fully clean and we were told in no uncertain terms that if we entered the clean room without following a procedure it would take another 6 months to clean and we would be sacked.

Repairing hard drives eh? That's when they were expensive. Now you just pig them in the bin.

I don't remember the hack needed to format hard disks, but I've been to bed many times since then lol. I remember using Pip for pretty much every operation under CP/M. Copy files, set the serial port parameters.......

I can still remember some of the commands for WordStar which were completely arbritary and not for the feint hearted!

God I'm an old fart!
 
My goodness yes, PIP. So many memories. C/PM. massive discs on the PDP 11's. Ferrite core memory!! Pascal was one of my favourite languages. Fortran IV running on George V main Frame (I think) and punched cards. Then there was open GL. Lots of graphics work. Really cool. Cobol, yes, but I found it a bit too long winded and tedious. I reaaly like machine code 6502, etc. Commodore 64, great little home computer. Rather simple and small in all way but very innovative. Never had a BBC or Spectrum tho. Now a quad core Intel based PC to drive my music software.
 
I used to read Practical Electronics and they offered a 6800 based micro computer with a green gas phosphorous display. In reality, it was a cash register board where some clever devil had re-written the ROM as a development system.

I wrote many programs in 6800 machine code and can still remember some of the instructions. when you turned it off, you lost it all so I fitted some cmos RAM and a battery backup so it could wake up with the program intact.

Spent bloomin' hours on it. One wrong instruction and..... crash! Start typing again.....

My Pascal programming was in Borland Delphi. A high level but very powerful language. You could write and use your own DLLs in Windows and there was a lot of 3rd party support for it.

My favourite of all time is Java. The language is so consistent and intuitive, you could often guess what you needed next without looking it up.

My MSc project was in Java. It read and indexed print jobs from the accounts department which meant they could search using a database rather than thumb through paper printouts for hours. It was called Pulp Fiction lol.

I never got into Apple mac programming as you have to own a mac and I never bought one.
 
What? No one done any FORTRAN? It's what I started on although I soon moved to C++ for many years before I found talking to people more interesting than staring at a screen. I can still make sense of a bit of Python or Perl or Java and I have become the goto for debugging Excel formula ... but that is not an invitation 😎
 
Musician and ex software test automation engineer here. City and guilds in Pascal and C# for the automation.
 
Yup Fortran here too. I forgot the 6800. There are so many I have forgotten.

Did my computation degree project in Ada (a then very new-ish language)

Those were the days....
 
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