Subj : hello! :DD
To   : Ben Collver
From : Skylar
Date : Tue Apr 16 2024 04:01 pm

  Re: hello! :DD
  By: Ben Collver to Skylar on Tue Apr 16 2024 09:42 am

 > How cool that your first dev work was in 1991!
 > What were you developing?

I started programming in BASIC in 1982. My first paid work was in 1990, writing educational "courses" on health topics. One of my college buddies was doing it and at one point had more contracts than he could complete as timely as requested. He had a system "templated", if you will. So each course was not written from scratch but did require custom/new coding. I did two of those projects using Turbo C (1.0, I think).

My first full-time dev job was creating an educational courseware authoring and playback system. Content creators would write material in WP, which we then imported into "screens". The authoring side created chapters/lessons/pages of content, which could have scrollable regions, pictures, limited animation (think animated GIFs), and sound. We hired local voice talent to narrate each course, which could be turned on or off. Each lesson had a test at the end that varied each time, as it randomly chose questions from a larger pool.

We started with MS C, switched to Turbo C, then Borland C++. Our biggest issue was memory, as both applications were GUI, complete with menus, buttons, mouse support, etc. But the C-Scape library we used to build the GUI was huge. We used RT-Link to implement "virtual memory" for our apps, where they would swap memory to disk the way modern OSes do. Even that had limits though. After I left, they switched to Watcom C and a DOS Extender.

About 16 months after I left, they hired me back to port the whole shabang to Win32 using Borland C++ Builder.

I've also worked on apps for county goverment and healthcare (practice management and insurance stuff). Those are the three primary fields of my professional experience.

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