[AccessD] Apparently Code {project is in a Nostalgic Mood today

[John Colby]

I started programming with Turbo Pascal on CPM86 around 1983 ish.  I had
built a single board computer with an 80186 running at a smoking 16 mhz,
512K of SRam, a dual 8" floppy and two RS232 ports.  At the time I was
working for Megatek Corp, a manufacturer of graphics terminals.

You know you are old when the article about the company you worked for is
labeled "a history lesson"

Megatek Graphics
<https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/102711966>

At any rate one day I found 4 of their "low end" graphics teminas in the
dumpster.  As my job was to fix these things I hauled them out of the
dumpster and went in to ask my boss if I could have them.  To which they
replied "No, they have to be destroyed - tax write offs".  They were
engineering development machines, essentially prototypes of what had become
production machines.  Anyway... I eventually persuaded them to let me keep
them - after I had signed a document agreeing not to sell them.

So now I had a full on state of the art personal computer and 4 graphics
terminals which were actually more powerful than my personal computer.  I
had a friend Richard, who was a programmer for Megatek writing drivers for
our terminals.  He came to my house after I got everything set up and
showed me how to write the drivers (in turbo pascal) for these machines.

The start of a long and fruitful career.  I actually worked as a programmer
using Turbo Pascal throughout the late 80s, until I switched to Microsoft
Access and VBA in 1992.

On Wed, Jan 3, 2024 at 9:27 AM Rocky Smolin <rockysmolin2 at gmail.com> wrote:

> The IDEs we had 30 years ago... and we lost (substack.com)
> <https://blogsystem5.substack.com/p/the-ides-we-had-30-years-ago-and>
>
> r
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-- 
John W. Colby
Colby Consulting