DIY Programming

Shayla

WOW Framer
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Apr 5, 2008
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Washington State
Not wanting to pay Quick Books fifty bucks a month for the service, Hubby wrote a program that helps him to do quarterlies. This weekend, he got done in twenty minutes what used to take two hours. He learned to code last year, and built a website for his day job employer. Pretty cool, that he keeps adding to his bag of tricks.

Do any of you write your own programs/code? (It's a safe bet that Mike does.) I would have zero clue.
 
Back in 1990 when PC's were just starting to grow i wrote a program for the local Council.

I currently worked there in rates and Payroll.
The Family Day care department would have to create invoices for clients as well as the payroll for the home helpers. It used to take 2 ladies a week to do this.

So i wrote a program on excel where they could just input the time sheets, and it would calculate the the invoices for the clients and payroll at the same time.
This meant it only took 1 person 2 days.

The council sent me to Unisys who were running courses on excel and i ended up showing the tutor how to do things.
I did not know it at the time but the Government were looking into programs to do the exact thing i had created. My council had submitted the program i created and it was authorised as only 1 of 4 that could be used.
Up against the big companies.

However, i was young 20, and not really aware of abilities and liked to party. Left probably 6 months later to travel for the next 7 years. Apparently they continued to use my program for the following 5 years.
If i had of known, i would have developed independently and charged for it.

Anyway, i do plan to learn when i can find more time.
My son just turned 9 is learning Python. So i am hoping to follow along and learn with him. But i am sure he will learn it quicker then me.
 
QuickBooks has a feature that memorizes transactions built into the standard program. When the designated date arrives, it automatically creates the transaction. You do have to print the check via "print checks" manually whenever you print another check.
 
Shayla, I started programming in Fortran, back in the late 60's. Some machine language [used punched cards].

After PC's came out tried to do some simplified basic on the Apple 3. But then with the IBM PC competition, Apple decided to stop serving the business market and they came out with their Macintosh which was more for the arts side. They basically stopped support / development on the Apple 3 side, so I had to go to IBM.

Did programming on PC's, including DBase, Basic, and others, and a lot of conversion of client databases into Dbase, and later, into earlier versions of Excel, and finally Access.

I have my own POS system / accounting system that is primarily in Access, but it also links with Excel. I can get supplier price info in a text file that I can import into Excel before linking to Access.
 
QuickBooks has a feature that memorizes transactions built into the standard program. When the designated date arrives, it automatically creates the transaction. You do have to print the check via "print checks" manually whenever you print another check.

Or, if you have AutoPay set up, you can just do nothing, if you have it set to Automatically Enter.
 
I learned Fortran 4 in school. When I was in Kmart's DP department as a system analyst, Cobol was used. We were designing a system before PCs existed to set up data transfer between stores and corporate. The system included payroll, inventory control, and POS. The Burrough's bookkeeping machine ran out of space for memory @ 32K. The modems were 300 baud and the data and program were on 1/4" cassettes.
 
I wrote my own POS. I use Visual Basic. Here's a link to a video I posted on Fracebook a while back:
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Oh, for the days of FORTRAN. Sublime function with no extra baggage. A computer that computed. One file at a time, and all of it within the grasp of the programmer. Mano a mano. Just me and the machine. Logical, inviolate rules, and a keypunch machine that made tangible cards with all the code in full view.
 
Oh, for the days of FORTRAN. Sublime function with no extra baggage. A computer that computed. One file at a time, and all of it within the grasp of the programmer. Mano a mano. Just me and the machine. Logical, inviolate rules, and a keypunch machine that made tangible cards with all the code in full view.


Except the computer was 45 miles away, and 24 hour turnaround, and we had to send the punch cards and hope they didn't get dropped. and dang, I coded '1H1' for a page break, instead of '1H0' for a line break, and I got 95 blank pages - yes the good old days.
 
I never wrote any code, but when I was a sociology student we would have to key in the results of our surveys to a terminal that would generate stacks of punch cards to take to the computer center on campus for tabulation and printout on tractor-feed paper. Woe betide anyone who bent, folded, spindled, or mutilated those cards, or got them out of order.
:cool: Rick
 
I knew some engineers that bathed in Fortran. All geeks.

Cobol was the language of power. Ever try it?
 
I knew some engineers that bathed in Fortran. All geeks.

Cobol was the language of power. Ever try it?

Yes, and I preferred Fortran. Cobol reminded me of a programming language that would be designed by a government agency. - too much structure.
 
Cobol was the goto language for business system development in the day.

Right. And you haven't lived unless you've had to debug a large government system that failed at 4:00 in the morning.
 
I still have this tablet of blank Fortran coding forms from my college days. Don't remember anything about it, though, other than you wanted everything to be concise.

Fortran Form.jpg
 
You missed Mark IV.

That's the one that let's you build a castle in two minutes. Great if you had ADD.
 
He's getting ready to learn a new one. Not sure what it is. He's good at patiently explaining how regular programming is all just a bunch of 1's and 0's, but it escapes me. Then again, I can make pies and he can't.
 
Cobol was the goto language for business system development in the day.

Yes, just like a narrow black frame is the go to frame for many customers. Doesn't mean it is right.

But yes, our computer group probably had 10 COBOL programmers, and 2 Assembler programmers, and 1 Fortran programmer. And 20 keypunch operators. In College, the program languages were assembler and Fortran - no COBOL I saw, but I was in Engineering School. And I had a great slide rule too.
 
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