The first program that was used at a company.

I wrote it on suggestion of my father to help with simplifying calculations for rental machines at his work and once finished it reduced time from start to finished report from 2-3 days down to 30 minutes, and corrections could be done in minutes instead of starting all over.

It also featured saving and loading old reports.

And for context, this was 1987 and excel did not exist and existing spreadsheets was not nearly as easy to use.

this is so cool! what did you use to build it??

That's a load of money they were saving on that one. Awesome!

@AleCx04 Turbo Pascal 5.5.

Before C# my favorite language.

@PonySlaystation well yes, but the savings was in practice a bit lower.

The problem with the manual way was that they used a manual calculator, one with a paper printout.

And they had to sum up numbers for all machines and then calculate how much each was of he total.

And any distraction like a phone call could have them drop where they was and start over with the specific computation.

With my program they just added all numbers and all results was calculated automatically.

Also, since many numbers did not change each month there was a lot of numbers they could keep from last month.

Today you would do it using excel.

Has they been able to work uninterrupted they could probably finish it in a few hours but yes it was.

Got my carrier as software developer started :)

@Voxera fascinating! I don't see many pascal devs in the wild. My previous employer used Delphi for some applications, he would have us go work with it from time to time to do some very small maintenance on it, I got enough to understand the language but not enough to do my own delphi gui based programs but I really enjoyed it.

I have been interested in Oxygen Pascal for a while, but would have to get deeper into the language to fully appreciate it. Such a shame that no much pascal development is happening now a days.

@AleCx04 I actually built a simple window manager for text mode to handle overlapping windows, with the caveat that it could not reorder, only stack and unstack them.

Used it for popups and in one occasion to split the screen up.

It included input boxed for text or numbers that could enforce length or format ;)

Also, nice borders in text mode.

And using direct memory access instead of bios calls to read and write to the screen for about 1000 times the performance :P

But C# is a worthy successor, designed by the same creator Anders Hjelsberg that created Turbo Pascal.