Steve Erbach
erbachs at gmail.com
Tue Feb 22 20:50:49 CST 2005
Kath, An old Paradox hand, eh? I was Northeastern Wisconsin's biggest Paradox evangelist. Didn't do any good, really, against Access, but I still support a few Paradox applications along with the Access and .NET work. Thank you for your story. Steve Erbach On Wed, 23 Feb 2005 09:43:33 +1100, Kath Pelletti <KP at sdsonline.net> wrote: > Hi Steve - it's been so interesting to read everyone's stories, so here's my 2 cents.. > > - I fell into IT after doing an Arts degree in Spanish and French. Language and music graduates were bombarded with offers from all sorts of companies that year (1982) as some research had come out indicating that anyone with an ability in music and language would probably succeed with the logic of computer programming and they were very short of IT graduates. > > They paid for us (I decided to give it a go, not finding a job in languages that I really wanted) to do a course which took 12 months and then took me on as trainee computer programmer - using Assembler (!) and Cobol. > > I found that I loved programming and later moved on to another firm using RPGII. Then changed to Analyst and Business Analyst. No experience with personal PC's which were very new back then but at one point I was asked to knock up a realtional db in Paradox using PAL. Loved it! So that was my introduction to small relational db's. > > Years later I cut back a bit on work to have my 3 children and was offered a part-time job doing computer training (which I still do a bit) so I had to learn Access to give the course. Trainees would approach us after the courses for help and I could see these applications whcih were going out without proper planning, testing etc. so I started offering those services on behalf of the training company. After a while I realised that I was becoming a one man band - making the sales pitch (still not a forte), designing the system, programming, testing and training the staff for inplementation - why do all this for someone else? So for the last 5 years I have been running my own small company doing just that - writing customised apps for clients using almost 100% Access - usually in 2000. > > Sometimes I am asked to create someting in Word or Excel. I also now do a bit of project management and user acceptance testing on behalf of clients. > > Not much change in the type of work over the 5 years - no one has asked me for Xp yet at all - so still implementing all Access 2000. > > Kath >