Commercial Applications on the “New IBM PC”
After 5 years working as an Analyst/C Programmer for Pancom Systems Pty Ltd. I have decided it is time to move onto something more physical.
In that time projects included:
- Development of a cashbook accounting system to run under both CPM and PC-DOS.
- Modification of an existing client/product management application and underlying database management system to add multi-user capabilities.
- Team leader for a significant upgrade of a client/product management application (including design and implementation of a high level database management system interface as well as several application modules).
- Evaluation of third party database development systems.
- Development of a prototype SQL based version of the client/product application.
Work here was fun in a small close knit team with just four or five programmers cutting C code, putting together useful libraries as needed and pumping out applications as well.
Some really amazing code was produced: we had a full multi-user, variable length data record, btree indexed database system implemented way before these things were available commercially at the PC level.
Debugging was only available at the assembler level via a command line debugger and at times required getting quite intermate with the BIOS.
We had one of the first token ring network systems up and running in Australia.
We developed our own programmers editor as there was nothing useful available on DOS – this ended up turning into ED for Windows – still widely used by programmers the world over.
We also built our own comms program based on the Y protocol so we could send applications interstate nightly for testing – long before the internet made this common place and Continuous Testing became a legitamate development strategy.