by Jan Verhoeven, 16 November 2002
This article is about my own experience with computers and programming, dating back to 1971. A lot has changed over the years.
In 1971 I went to the Technical College in Breda, to study Electronics. There was a Digital PDP-8 computer that could be programmed by manually entering binary data using flip switches. You had to set the flips for the 8 or 16 bit word correct and press a button to load the data into memory.
A year later a new topic was introduced: Fortran programming. One of our teachers was also teaching at the Technical University in Eindhoven and did have access to a main frame computer. We wrote our Fortran Programs on paper. In Eindhoven the program was entered on punch cards, loaded and run. A week later we did get the output back on folded computer paper.
During my practical year I went to Switzerland and bought a book on something totally new: the Intel 8080 microprocessor. I read and read the book over and over and was excited by the idea that someday I could have my own computer.
By 1976 I had graduated and started working as a Control Systems Engineer with a large Engineering company that designed Petro-Chemical plants. We were using a main frame to store data about the instruments, but I was only using the paper indexes that came out of the main frame.
A couple of years later I could purchase my first programmable device: a Texas Instruments TI59 programmable calculator. It had been around for some time but was way too expensive for my modest budget. You could store your progams on magnetic cards and read them back in. It was single step programming with not much features, but you did have controlled loops. I wrote programs for sizing control valves and flow instruments, and a couple of simple games. I remember a game where you had to enter the trust for a rocket. The goal of the game was to get the rocket has high as possible without leaving the earth. Which would happen with too much force.
Somewhere around 1980 I bought my first personal computer. You did not have PC's I that time. You had the PET Commodore (which I bought) and the Apple II (which had more features but was too expensive for me). The PET was a machine where Computer, Monitor and Keyboard where all-in-one. A small screen with green characters. No graphics apart from the graphical style characters. 40 columns wide and 25 lines heigh. I could be programmed in Basic and in Machine Language and I wrote many, many programs. The PET had a Rockwell 6502 microprocessor on board. My brother in law had a book on the 6502 which included the description of an assembler. I spend some time typing in all the hex-codes and finally I had my min-assembler, allowing me to enter mnemonic letters, speeding up the process.
Some years after that an english collegue bought an Apple II and needed a text processor. Now you can get (payed for or free) many word processors. At time there was nothing available. So I began writing a text processor in Assembly Language. I worked. My collegue could write his letters and print them out on a hooked on electronic IBM type-writer. Just imagine how I had to write everything: logic to display and scroll text and the screen, file manager, logic to get the document to the printer including character conversions etc.
We moved to a different house and I bought the Amstrad PC128, which had a Z80 processor, 128kb of ram and a 3-1/4 disk drive. No hard disk of course. 3-1/4 you may ask. Yes, at that time the 3-1/2 inch floppy as we know it till today was available but not the only format around. A couple of years later the 3-1/4 inch format was not produced anymore. The computer was not a good buy.
In 1991 I bough my first real IBM PC compatible as we know it today. It had a 128MB harddisk, 8MB of memory and an Intel 80480 (33MHz) processor. It was a top of the bill machine when I bought it, but whithin a year things would accelerate in the computer world. Now I could work at home with the programs I allready had used at work: Lotus-123 and WordPerfect 5.1. It was the time that Microsoft gained influence with Windows 3.1. That first year I used both DOS-based and Windows based programs. This machine would be used intensively for over 8 years. The memory was expanded from 8MB to 32MB. The hard disk was replaced by a 1.6GB disk. The operating system changed to Windows 95.
That 1991 PC would last a long time. It was not until 1999 that it was replaced by a 400MHz AMD processesor. The available hardware became faster, bigger and cheaper over the years.
In 1997 I got my first internet provider and started my own website. On October 14, 1997 I got my Nedstat counter, that since then registered almost 1.5 million pageviews.
Having internet access was a major factor in my programming efforts. Until then most of my programs where for personal use. As of 1997 I started writing for anyone that wants to use my programs.
After I discovered Delphi on a CD-rom that came with the PC-Plus magazine, I have not left it since. Today I am using Delphi 5 to write my programs, because it happens to be the version that I also use at work. Delphi 6 was purchased last year but has not been used very much.
After several years of looking for a good place for my site I finally was offered hosting by www.webmasterbiz.com and registered my own domain name: http://jansfreeware.com .
Over the years I have seen many hypes come and go. The best does not always win. What seemed important all the time was: ability to exchange. You can have an excellent Word Processor, but if it can not read and write in a range of different formats then people will not buy it.
New standards like XML and SVG are introduced. My personal approach has always been: embrace the new and do not forget the old ways. A good example is storing data. If you want to store and retrieve huge amounts of data then nothing beats a relational dabase management system. Years of development have gone into the various RDMS and you should not expect the same kind of performance from XML bases databases.
My advice: use the new techniques to your advantage when they are better then an old method, but otherwise: stick to time proven methods. Or even better: use them both, each at the right place and in the right way.